The Last of Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

Hemingway fights, predictably poorly:

On the eleventh of August, days before sailing back to Spain, Hemingway dropped by Scribners without calling ahead, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and roamed back to his editor’s corner office. Sitting with Perkins, his back to the door, was Max Eastman. They were planning a new edition of his Enjoyment of Poetry. Ernest barged in and quickly realized who the other party was. Because Hemingway had often told Perkins what he would do if he ever met Eastman, because of that piece Eastman had written several years earlier, ”Bull in the Afternoon,” Perkins swallowed hard and thought fast. Hoping humor would work, Perkins said to Eastman, “Here’s a friend of yours, Max.”

Hemingway shook hands with Eastman and they swapped amenities. Then Ernest, with a broad smile, ripped open his shirt and exposed a chest which Perkins thought was hirsute enough to impress any man. Eastman laughed, and Ernest good-naturedly reached over and unbuttoned Eastman’s shirt, revealing a chest as bare as a bald man’s head. Everyone laughed at the contrast. Perkins got ready to expose his chest, sure that he could place second, when Hemingway truculently demanded of Eastman, "What do you mean [by] accusing me of impotence?”

Eastman denied that he had, and there were sharp words back and forth. Eastman said, "Ernest, you don’t know what you are talking about.
Here, read what I said.” He picked up a copy of Art and the Life Of Action on Perkins's desk, which the editor had there for some other reason, not even remembering that it contained ”Bull in the Afternoon,“ But instead of reading the passage Eastman pointed out, Ernest begin part of another paragraph, and trailed off into muttered profanity. "Read all of it, Ernest,” Eastman urged him. "You don't understand it. . . , Here, let Max read it.”

Perkins saw that things were getting serious. He started to read, thinking that would somehow calm things down. But Ernest snatched the book from him and said, ”No, I am going to do the reading." As he started again, his face flushed, and he turned and smacked Eastman with the open book. Eastman rushed at him. Perkins, fearful that Ernest would kill Eastman, ran around his desk to grab Hemingway from behind. As the two authors grappled, all the precariously balanced books and papers on Perkins’s desk toppled off, and both men fell to the floor. Thinking he was restraining Hemingway, Perkins grabbed the man on top. But when Max looked down, there was Ernest on his back, gazing up at him, his broken glasses dangling and a naughty grin from ear to ear. Apparently he had regained his composure instantly upon striking Eastman and put up no resistance whatever when Eastman landed on top of him.

After Hemingway and Eastman parted, Perkins spoke to the crowd of employees who had gathered. All agreed to say nothing. Max Eastman, however, wrote out an account of the incident, and the next night at a dinner where there were a number of newspaper people, he read it aloud, apparently at the urging of his wife. The next day Perkins’s office swarmed with journalists, and another group interviewed Ernest at the docks just before he sailed for Europe. According to the Times, ”Mr. Hemingway explained that. he had felt sorry for Mr. Eastman, for he knew he had seriously embarrassed him by slapping his face. ‘The man didn’t have a bit of fight. He just croaked, you know, at Max Perkins, “Who’s calling on you, Ernest or me?” ’ So I got out.”

Perkins maintained a public position of silent neutrality, but to spe’ cial friends such as Scott Fitderald and Elizabeth Lemmon he told all. He believed Hemingway could have annihilated Eastman if he had wanted to; but he noted that Eastman did have both Hemingway's shoulders pinned. Fitzgerald was grateful for the blow-by-blow account, because he had heard every possible version of the tussle "save that Eastman has fled to Shanghai with Pauline.”

and

Louise (Perkins) was back in the country for good, but again she found herself with an excess of energy, a surplus that city life had used to burn off. Her passion to perform on stage had eased, but a restlessness still flickered within her. She searched for a life of her own outside the house, and soon she found it.
Early in 1938 several nuns from the local Roman Catholic parish came to the Perkinses’ door to speak to their Catholic cook. Louise chatted with the sisters for a few minutes, then wrote their church a generous check. The nuns stayed to talk some more, and by the time they left, Louise had become impressed with Catholicism. She looked into it a bit further, and several weeks later she found herself in earnest conversation with the parish priest. ”What means the most to you apart from people?” he asked her. Her reply came without hesitation: ”Talent in the theater.” The priest told her to "take that and lay it on the altar of Jesus Christ.” At age fifty, Louise emerged from the wings into her new holy theater with all the vitality of an ingenue and the enthusiasm of a convert. As Elizabeth Lemmon noted, "Louise always had a passion for purple.” Whether or not her motivation was truly religious, it was strong. Friends and relatives indicated that Louise’s conversion had more than theatrical implications. Several people said it was her ”rebellion against the family.” One daughter suggested it was another stage in ”Mother’s lifelong struggle to be creative.”

Max was not convinced by Louise’s new devotion. Once, when she began one of her crusades, attempting to reform her entire household, he pointed out, ”Your voice takes on a phony tone whenever you talk about the Church.” When she asked for the umpteenth time, "Max, why won’t you try it once?”-as though it were some new headache remedy he responded, "And have you tried Buddha?” The harder she fought to save his soul, the harder Max resisted. It was a new version of their perennial battle-silent reserve versus unrestrained enthusiasm. Louise proselytized wherever she went, often to Max’s embarrassment. She sprinkled holy water all over the house, dousing Max’s pillow several times a week. With a sigh he would ask his daughters if they could not ”do something” about their mother. One evening, when she was running low on reasons why Max should convert, she told him if he did not start confessing his sins and taking Communion he would burn in hell. “Thank God I’m not going to heaven--” he came back, ”with all you Catholics.”

and

(Perkins gave contracts to people he) felt had lived interesting lives filled with colorful characters and dramatic events. But often, he eventually realized, these were the very people who lacked the perseverance or talent to write. Perkins gave a middling advance to one artist who was famous for his exploits and wanted to write his life story. The artist used the money to hire a succession of beautiful secretaries, "No matter what chapter from his life he set out to dictate,” Malcolm Cowley related in the N ew Yorker in the early forties, ”he found that the only words he could say were, ‘Miss Jones, did anyone ever tell you that you were beautiful?’ The book hasn’t been started, but Perkins thinks the artist still has it in him, and that someday, barring accidents, he will get it out.”

As did every publisher, Scribners gambled away thousands of dollars on books that never materialized, and the responsibility for every one of them weighed heavily on Max's conscience. When a manuscript came in and was unpublishable, Max felt even worse. "This is the way of it,” he explained to Elizabeth Lemmon. ”All my life, always, I’ve got myself into a jam and had to get out of it or die, all because of carelessness and folly. So I take on these books from something in the writer and my response to it. Then comes the ms. or the first part of it. I can’t give it to anyone else. They would say it was rotten, or not worth labor. I have to do the work, and I do it over and over in desperation. Sometimes I’d be ashamed to show it.”

and

William B. Wisdom had been gathering Wolfe’s writings for years.
He planned to establish a memorial at Harvard-a collection of all the Wolfe material he could get hold of, including, he hoped, the passionate love letters between Wolfe and Mrs. Bernstein. Their sweetest and ugliest sentiments were conveyed in those letters. One of the most memorable salutations, for example, read, ”My heavy-breasted, grey-haired Jewish bitch, I love the stench of your plum-colored arm-pits.” In June, 1943, Aline wrote Perkins,
I daresay I will get used to the idea of my letters to Tom being sold, but I’m not used to it yet in spite of the fact that it is legal. It is all a shock to me, but amounts to little in the scale of people’s sorrow now on earth. So this is the end of it from me to you. I carry with me always though, the pain of the fact that our relationship, Tom’s and mine, was never resolved during his life. Maybe it never could have been. It held so much, for so long a time, time that was magnificent, and even at the end he must have known in his heart’s core, how we were to each other.

In due course Perkins asked Mrs. Bernstein to surrender her own letters from Tom for the collection. She consented, but would not give them to Wisdom-whom she. suspected of profiting from the Wolfe material-for nothing. After several years of negotiating, Wisdom purchased the collection. Mrs. Bernstein demanded that every penny of the money due her go to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Writing to Max about this stipulation, she said: "It will be a retaliation for all the insults to the Jews that Tom hurled at me.”

and

That summer Perkins saw the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was delighted when he first heard that Gary Cooper was going to play the lead role. Perkins admired him so much that he had seen him in Sergeant York twice. After seeing the new film, though, Max realized the limitations of his favorite actor and the medium itself. He wrote Evan Shipman:

Of course Gary Cooper is just the way he always is-which is good, but is not Robert, nor anything like him. That is partly because all the subjective part of the story, or almost all, has got lost. Perhaps necessarily.

The only other motion picture that Perkins had ever shown any interest in was The Charge of the Light Brigade. He did not want to view the entire film, just the charge itself. Max made his middle daughter, Peggy, accompany him to the theater. He stationed her so that she could watch both the screen and her father, who stood in the lobby. They waited an hour and a half for the climactic moment. When she saw that Errol Flynn was about to lead the charge, Peggy signaled, Perkins advanced through the lobby, stood in the aisle, and observed the Brigade’s routing. Then Max and his daughter promptly retreated.
Ernest Hemingway had been in Cuba for the better part of the last year-~“doing whatever it is he is doing,” Max wrote Evan Shipman. Papa was busy patrolling in his boat, searching for German submarines. This was important work, he said, and he could not write while the war was going on. Perkins wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt but knew there was more to it than that.

and

There was no Gulf Stream for Perkins to glide off in, just a multiplying burden of anxieties. His authors’ plights, laid upon him, became more horrific, often macabre: One wanted Perkins’s counsel regarding her daughter who was having a breakdown; another sent him glimpses from her own traumatic childhood-true Gothic tales of being forced to dig up a dead sister’s corpse and dress her in doll’s clothes. There were distant relatives who had to borrow money or were seeking jobs, marriage problems of inlaws, women’s clubs campaigning against smut in literature, ethnic and political groups protesting certain characterizations, young people constantly seeking advice on becoming published writers, more family war casualties, authors whose books demonstrated that the earth was round but that we lived inside of it, or who had written five-volume novels entitled God. Through it all he kept his head while all about him were losing theirs.

The Duchess of Devonshire

From: Wait for Me!
Two things annoyed Farve in my mother's otherwise impeccably run house. If a housemaid was rash enough to remove the deepest ashes from the grate where a wood fire burned, she was in trouble. Farve was right: it is the ashes that hold the heat and ensure a quick start in the morning. He found a way of avoiding the second annoyance. After breakfast he refilled his coffee cup and took it to his study. He let it get cold and drank what he called his ‘suckments’ at intervals during the morning. A tidy, new-to-the-job maid took the cup back to the pantry, emptied and washed it. This enraged my father: ‘Some monkey’s orphan has taken my suckments.’ Thereafter he locked the cup in his safe.

Farve was impatient, intolerant, impulsive, loyal, courageous, loving, fastidious, unread and possessed of great charm, all underwritten with courtly good manners to most. Every now and then his short fuse made him lash out. He was profoundly irritated by some of the young men Nancy invited to the house and more than once lost his temper with her friend James Lees-Milne, the future author and diarist. On one occasion Jim leant down to pick something up and a comb fell out of his pocket: ‘A man carrying a comb well!' On another famous occasion, Jim advocated friendship with Germany and Farve turned him out of the house. Poor Jim went to his motorbike but it was raining hard and it would not start. In despair he found the back door and was rescued by Mabel who hustled him upstairs. As he was creeping out of the house the next morning he met Farve. ‘Good morning,’ said Farve. He had forgotten the whole episode and offered Jim our usual generous breakfast.

Farve either liked you or he did not, there was no middle way. My mother sometimes tried to reason with him, but reason was not part of his makeup and, unlike her, he had favourites. This was unfair but he never tried to hide or moderate his feelings, it was part of his honesty. There was often a ‘Rat Week’ when he would pick on one of us for some] times imaginary offences. Decca, who was able to twist him round her little finger and take liberties with him that none of the rest of us would have dared, fell out of favour for a while for no apparent reason. Unity became more silent and unresponsive in her teens because Farve was always watching her for some trifling misdemeanour.

It had been the same with his own brothers and sisters. He never liked his younger sister Joan but was fond of the man she married, Denis Farrer. ‘The very desiccated Old Dean’, he called him affectionately. Denis was not a dean, it was just a play on his name, but it was a spot-on description of that thin, sharp-featured fellow in middle age. Farve was once talking to an acquaintance about the Farrers and said, 'The only trouble with the Old Dean is that he married a ghastly woman.’ ‘Oh?’ said the acquaintance. ‘I thought she was your sister?’ Yes, she is. A poisonous creature.’

and

Muv told me that had she had to earn her living she would have been happy as the woman at the caisse in a Paris restaurant, usually a formidable female dressed in black who sat enclosed in a raised glass cage above the tables and collected the cash from the diners’ bills. The nearest Muv got to her ambition was to be County Treasurer of the Oxfordshire Federation‘of Women’s Institutes.

Alice Chapter 3

A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale

  They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank--the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.
  The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they had a consultation about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite natural to Alice to find herself talking familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her life. Indeed, she had quite a long argument with the Lory, who at last turned sulky, and would only say, `I am older than you, and must know better'; and this Alice would not allow without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said.
  At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among them, called out, `Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I'LL soon make you dry enough!' They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the Mouse in the middle. Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon.
  `Ahem!' said the Mouse with an important air, `are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! "William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria--"'
  `Ugh!' said the Lory, with a shiver.
  `I beg your pardon!' said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: `Did you speak?'
  `Not I!' said the Lory hastily.
  `I thought you did,' said the Mouse. `--I proceed. "Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable--"'
  `Found WHAT?' said the Duck.
  `Found IT,' the Mouse replied rather crossly: `of course you know what "it" means.'
  `I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing,' said the Duck: `it's generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?'
  The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, `"--found it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown. William's conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of his Normans--" How are you getting on now, my dear?' it continued, turning to Alice as it spoke.
  `As wet as ever,' said Alice in a melancholy tone: `it doesn't seem to dry me at all.'
  `In that case,' said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, `I move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies--'
  `Speak English!' said the Eaglet. `I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!' And the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.
  `What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.'
  `What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
  `Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
  First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'
  This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.'
  `But who is to give the prizes?' quite a chorus of voices asked.
  `Why, SHE, of course,' said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger; and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out in a confused way, `Prizes! Prizes!'
  Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her pocket, and pulled out a box of comfits, (luckily the salt water had not got into it), and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly one a-piece all round.
  `But she must have a prize herself, you know,' said the Mouse.
  `Of course,' the Dodo replied very gravely. `What else have you got in your pocket?' he went on, turning to Alice.
  `Only a thimble,' said Alice sadly.
  `Hand it over here,' said the Dodo.
  Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying `We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble'; and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.
  Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.
  The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and confusion, as the large birds complained that they could not taste theirs, and the small ones choked and had to be patted on the back. However, it was over at last, and they sat down again in a ring, and begged the Mouse to tell them something more.              

Churchill and Chamberlain

From The Dark Valley:
Churchill remained a compelling figure, for all his comic quirks, and a statesman of the front rank even though he had been for so long conlined to the back-benches. Phipps spared no pains to discredit him with the French, assuring Herriot and others that Churchill only spoke for a very small section of the British public and that his utterances should be taken with “liberal sprinklings of salt.”

It was not surprising that Churchill should have provoked mistrust. For although he was brave, eloquent, witty, industrious, dogged, versatile and supremely talented, with most great offices of state under his belt and many gorgeous feathers in his cap, Churchill had given more hostages to fortune than any other politician of his day. Britain’s leading parliamentarian had changed parties twice and policies so often that, Lord Beaverbrook declared, he had held every view on every question. Said to be a warlord at sea during Armageddon, Churchill had sired the Dardanelles disaster. He had treated strikers as the enemy within and earned a reputation as warmonger towards foreign foes. He had returned the pound to the gold standard at too high a rate. He had attacked progress towards Indian independence, branding himself as a blimpish reactionary. In a mood of cavalier romanticism during the abdication crisis he had championed Edward VIII. In short, Churchill seemed to be brilliant but unsound. It was an opinion to which most leading figures of the day subscribed. According to Asquith, Churchill thought with his mouth and had “genius without judgement.” He possessed a powerful brain, noted Lloyd George, but it was prevented from running true by “a tragic flaw in the metal.”‘ Baldwin repeated (and modified) a story told by an early biographer that at Churchill’s birth the good fairies came trooping in with their gifts-imagination, daring, energy, guts-and then a bad fairy arrived to deny him wisdom. It became a commonplace to depict Churchill as a buccaneer: picturesque certainly, but rash, ambitious, dangerous and volatile. R. A. Butler, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office before the war, considered him “the greatest adventurer of modern political history”

Butler also cast aspersions on Churchill’s origins, calling him a “half breed American.” This was a typical instance of the character assassination by association to which he was subjected. Undoubtedly, though, Churchill’s stock was lowered as much by his rakish relations as by his disreputable friends. They all seemed to identify him as “a particularly way, Ward, rootless and anachronistic product of a decaying and increasingly discredited aristocratic order.”8 Churchill’s mother was not only the daughter of a notorious Wall Street speculator, she also acquired a train of unsuitable husbands and lovers. His father, the erratic and syphilitic Lord Randolph, was a striking example of ducal degeneracy. For “all his remark~ able cleverness” Lord Randolph was, in the estimation of the fifteenth earl of Derby, “thoroughly untrustworthy: scarcely a gentleman, and probably more or less mad.”Winston’s staunch belief in Churchills against the world seemed less like family loyalty than tribal chauvinism when other members of his clan were considered: vapid dilettantes such as Moreton Frewen, known as “Mortal Ruin”; blue-blooded boors such as “Sunny,” ninth Duke of Marlborough, whose wife Gladys said that he was ruled by “black, vicious personal pride like a disease”;‘° the unwelcome and nonpaying Guests; and, the greatest trial of all, Churchill’s spoiled son Randolph, who jovially acknowledged that he was not fit to be allowed out in private.

Churchill’s friends were cast in the same mould, with the partial exception of the vegetarian, non-smoking, teetotalitarian Professor Frederick Lindemann. (Even he was a social carnivore-he once took counsel’s opinion about what place he was entitled to occupy at high table in his Oxford college, Christ Church.) They were high-living and often hard-drinking freebooters who dwelt on the outer edge of respectability. F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was considered to be a “fluent and plausible bounder”II early in his career, while later, to his fury, he was represented as a “crapulous and corpulent buffoon.”“ Lord Beaverbrook was aptly nicknamed “Been-a-crook” and seemed to be “a kind of Dracula, Svengali, Iago and Mephistopheles rolled into one.” Brendan Bracken, the redhaired financial and political chancer who was (wrongly) rumoured to be Churchill’s illegitimate son, appeared to be a charlatan incarnate. “Everything about you is phoney,” said a journalist; “Even your hair, which looks like a wig, isn’t.”‘With friends and relations like these, Churchill understandably offended the bourgeoisie, though he did not let that worry him. He used “middle-class” as a term of abuse, shared his father’s disdain for suburban “lords of pineries and vineries” and despised “adjectival grocers”“-what he would have made of an adjectival grocer’s daughter can only be imagined.

Churchill’s extravagant style of life was also an affront to more modest folk, especially during the Depression: adopting F. E. Smith’s maxim, he professed to be easily satisfied with the very best. He behaved like a nabob, crowned with flamboyant hats out of doors and robed in garish dressing gowns at home. With the body of an unrepentant sybarite and “the face of a self-indulgent cherub,”‘he exuded an aura of cigar smoke, eau-de-Cologne and good liquor. (His wine merchant’s bills, which were large and paid slowly, as he had a lordly way with tradesmen, included many half bottles of champagne-not for sharing. But he was no alcoholic for, as C. P. Snow said, no alcoholic could drink that much.) Churchill’s appetite for food was gargantuan: he liked roast beef as well as white wine for breakfast, with other meals on an equally carnivorous scale. He made no secret of his patrician taste for gambling, polo and hunting (foxes not women). Servants were part of the tenure of his existence, running his life on oiled wheels. His country house, Chartwell Manor, near Westerham in Kent, was organised like a miniature Blenheim Palace.

Churchill adored Chartwell and spent huge sums on renovating and improving it, with mixed results. The dining-room, for example, scene of oratorical as well as gastronomic feasts, had to accommodate great girders which made it much too low for its length. It was like eating in a basement-except for the wonderful views over Churchill’s happy valley. This he cherished. He planted and dug, laid out a tennis court and excavated a swimming-pool which was heated so that it steamed. He built enormous walls, laying bricks with more energy than skill and often dictating letters as he went. He created lakes, dams, waterfalls, fish-ponds, treating his black swans, golden orfe and other creatures with anthropomorphic indulgence. He farmed in a lavish but inexpert fashion, telling Lloyd George that he was determined to make agriculture pay, “whatever it costs!”

Churchill often guyed himself thus, giving involuntary colour to hostile interpretations of his character and conduct. Equally provocative in deed, he was himself largely responsible for the fact that pre-war contemporaries saw him in caricature terms-as a fabulous soldier of fortune forever plotting some fantastic coup. That view of Churchill was almost entirely effaced by his great achievements during the Second World War and by his subsequent account of them. Since Churchill hung on to his prime-ministerial papers, this account was authoritatively documented as well as unashamedly partisan. History would be his judge, he liked to jest, and he would write the history. So for a generation Churchill remained a gleaming titan marching triumphantly to broad sunlit uplands through the pages of his own works-and those of his many admirers. His was the spirit that inspired the nation in its finest hour. His was the voice that gave the lion’s roar. He was the colossus who won victory over the forces. Churchill’s tragedy, and Britain’s, was that during the late 1930s he found himself cast in the role of Cassandra.

Churchill’s detractors, none of whom was more determined to keep him in the wilderness than Neville Chamberlain, would have been given pause for thought had they seen him reading and dictating with inexhaustible fecundity in his Chartwell bedroom. Surprisingly small and austere, with photographs of Lord Randolph and a wide bedside bookshelf crudely installed by the estate carpenter for his papers, it was not the boudoir of a hedonist but the billet of a campaigner. It plainly contradicted Chamberlain’s view of Churchill as a gaudy magnifico, improvising policies (some good, more bad) between drinks and sustaining them with nothing more than facile rhetoric. In fact Churchill did his homework quite as meticulously as Chamberlain himself, devoting particular attention to his parliamentary “impromptus.” Still, there is no denying that the two men were opposites without mutual attraction. Chamberlain, who succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937, might admire Churchill’s wit and brilliance, his courage and vitality, but he had always felt that there was an unbridgeable “gulf between him and me.” In his opinion Churchill was unstable and amoral. Taking issue with him was “like arguing with a brass band.“ He must at all costs be kept out of the cabinet, which he would dominate and even silence. When the War Minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, Urged Churchill’s inclusion, Chamberlain replied: “I won’t have anyone who will rock the boat.” For his part, Churchill professed respect for the tough imperial pioneer who had struggled unsuccessfully for seven years to grow sisal on his father’s estate in the Bahamas. But he was essentially out of sympathy with Chamberlain, regarding him as narrow-minded,
cold-hearted and dusty-souled. Theirs was the perennial opposition of the Puritan and the Cavalier. It was the opposition, too, “between Birmingham Town Hall and Blenheim Palace.”

CHAMBERLAIN was often disparaged for being unable to see beyond the confines of local government and petty commerce. Lloyd George maintained that he would have made a good Lord Mayor of Birmingham in a lean year and that he had “a retail mind in a wholesale business.” Experienced diplomats such as Sir Alexander Cadogan said that Chamberlain equated the conduct of foreign affairs with the handling of trade disputes. With a prissy manner, a reedy voice and a smug expression habitually imprinted on his corvine features, Chamberlain seemed every inch the political haberdasher. His conventional clothes added to the impression: the old-fashioned starched wing-collars; the black jacket and striped trousers; the inevitable umbrella, sceptre of the bourgeoisie since the time of Louis-Philippe-almost the only time Chamberlain showed anger was when his umbrella got broken. Although he was quite a cultured man, his amusements were on a similarly modest scale: he liked Christmas cracker jokes and games of musical chairs-at Cliveden, the Astors’ country house, he was allowed to win because it meant so much to him. Chamberlain’s international outlook was equally naive: America was “a nation of cads”; Russia was “semi-Asiatic”; and the French could not “keep a secret for more than half an hour, nor a government for more than nine rnonths.”‘Obviously Neville was a mere shadow of Joseph Chamberlain, lacking his father’s Olympian manner, global vision and volcanic eloquence. Indeed, like his siblings, Neville was “dwarfed and scorched by the towering inferno of his father’s personality.” He once said that reading about his father reminded him of studying the planets: his “own significance diminished with every step.”

Determined to prove himself, though, Chamberlain grew in self-confidence, even arrogance, with every step he took up the political ladder. Having entered parliament in 1918, aged almost 50, he made his name as a reforming Minister of Health during the late 1920s and as a masterful Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937. Stiff, reserved, penny-pinching and self-righteous, he was not a popular figure. Even his half-brother Austen remarked on his killing coldness. But such was his dedication to business, so logical were his policies and so lucid his speeches that he dominated the National Government. Once in 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain became a democratic despot. He was as masterful as Sir Robert Walpole, a portrait of whom (by Vanloo) hung over the marble fireplace behind his leather-upholstered chair in the long, Corinthian columned cabinet room.

Furthermore Chamberlain drew around himself an inner circle of subservient mediocrities, most of them knights remote from the practice of chivalry. Sir John Simon, a serpentine lawyer described as a snake in snake’s clothing, was singularly lacking in resolution at the Treasury: he had sat on the fence so long, Lloyd George famously remarked, that the iron had entered into his soul. Sir Samuel Hoare, now at the Home Office, had learned no lessons from the dictators: he was later said to have “passed from experience to experience, like Boccaccio’s virgin, without discernible effect upon his condition.” Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for Coordination of Defence, had little ability, less power and no perceptiveness: “He could look with frank and fearless gaze at any prospect, however appalling-and fail to see it.” Other acolytes, such as Sir Horace Wilson, with his “temporising, ‘play for safety,’ formula-evolving mind,” and Sir Kingsley Wood, who on the outbreak of war opposed the bombing of munition works in Germany because they were private property, were equally unable or unwilling to stand up to Chamberlain.

Compliance seemed to validate his growing assumption of infallibility, which was expressed with the jauntiness of a schoolboy and the primness of an old maid. Flattery fed Chamberlain’s vanity for, as one official noted, “he likes to be set on a pedestal and adored, with suitable humility, by unquestioning admirers.” There was “no surer way of gratifying him than to make some allusion to the exceptional importance of his position.” By the same token, criticism, mockery and disrespect infuriated him. Chamberlain became increasingly intolerant of disagreement, equating loyalty to himself with patriotism. He squashed or squared the press with unprecedented vigour, using lobby journalists to manipulate public opinion while contemptuously accusing the occasional dissenter of being duped by “Jewish-Communist propaganda.” Chamberlain deployed his own secret propaganda organ, the supposedly independent journal Truth, to discredit opponents. He tapped their telephones. He harried ministers and extended his control to every aspect of government. He crushed par~ liamentary debate, treating the Labour opposition with open contempt and imposing a ruthless discipline on his own rank and file. One Tory MP said that “they had now a Fuhrer in the Conservative Party.” Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, believed that Chamberlain “au fond had a certain sympathy for dictators, whose efficiency appealed to him.” Ironically, the champion of appeasement in Europe was not a weak Prime Minister but an exceptionally strong one. The would~be conciliator of the continent was a domestic autocrat.

White on Capote

Both Merimée and Capote justly prided themselves on being stylists, not in the Proustian sense (elaborating syntax, rhetoric and metaphor in order to assimilate the most disparate elements into a single sentence), but in the older sense in which ‘style’ meant fashioning the neatest, freshest, most natural classical prose in their respective traditions. Capote is a stylist who never intimidates his reader and whose poetic effects are purely local, never threatening the narrative progression. One lovely phrase follows another. Travel is a state of ‘alert slumber’. Before dawn ‘drooping stars drift at the bedroom window fat as owls’. A nighttime View of Tangier is ‘like a birthday cake blazing in a darkened room’. One can imagine this purist cutting down Proust’s usual three adjectives to the single limpid one, With a predictable loss of Chiaroscuro and gain in brightness and resolution.

He told me that he thought the story closest to perfection in Music for Chameleons was ‘Then It All Came Down’, which records a visit he paid to Robert Beausoleil in prison, the mystery man in the Charles Manson cult. ‘It’s as linear as a fish bone,’ Capote said, drawing the spine in the air with his fan. ‘It moves, it has narrative energy and drive.’ To illustrate, he snapped his fingers and sketched a little dance on the rug with his bare feet. ‘No one understands anything about style, about what I’m trying to do. Now the story “Dazzle” in Music for Chameleons it’s taken me forty years to learn how to write that way, to make it simple. Most writers start simple, then they become more and more complex. Then they have to unlearn everything they’ve acquired. Simplicity and swiftness: that’s what I value.

‘Of course, the most subtle story, the real subtlety ’ he lingered on the word as though he had invented it, or as though it were some foreign expression I might not have caught ~ ‘the most subtle story is “Music for Chameleons”. Even sophisticated readers don’t understand it. They think it’s about a visit with a woman; they think it’s a travel piece about Martinique.’ Spasm of laughter that stopped on a dime. ‘But it’s actually a meditation on murder, about how our passions flog us.’ He took off his glasses and stared at me with two perfectly clear blue eyes, the pupils tiny as gnats in the poisonous yellow light.

I asked him how he ever remembered the conversation he had had with Marilyn Monroe in 1955 after a funeral -one of the most touching and charming pieces in Music for Chameleons. ‘Well, Marilyn was a great friend. I loved her a lot. And never have I read anything that has anything to do with that girl at all except the basic -’ his voice died away and his face sank into a grimace worthy of the Greek mask for tragedy ‘. . . unpleasant facts . . .’ He suddenly brightened and turned to me; unfortunately the sun was glaring on his gray-tinted granny glasses and I’m staring into two silver dollars. ‘But, you see, I keep these extraordinary journals. And I suddenly remembered I had written down everything we’d said that day. Other people who knew her tell me I’ve caught the most perfect likeness. She was my first choice to be in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She and Maureen Stapleton even worked up a wonderful scene for an Actors Studio class; I saw it, but Marilyn was too afraid to do it in class. Excuse me.’

Capote left the room. When he regained the couch, he spoke to me in profile. His voice was high and weak and drawling and his pronunciation slack-jawed, mushy, like a child’s or like Baby Snooks’s. As he picked up confidence, volume, clarity, he turned the two silver dollars toward me. He shook the fan at me to cool me off. I stared down at his long yellow toenails, which reminded me of those four-inch thumbnails the mandarins grew to prove they were so rich they never had to pick anything up. Incapacitating nails and bound feet: emblems of regal dependence on others.

Capote is an entertainer who is never dull, who appeals to the reader’s curiosity without endangering his or her values, Who adds to our store of experience without undermining the categories by which we process that plenitude, whose tales of underdogs and heartbreaking failures only reinforce the political status quo. Capote’s fascinating criminals, lovable maiden aunts, precocious kids and wilted gentry, while appearing to upset the order of things, are in fact the exceptions that prove the rule. They may be rebels but Capote’s presentation of them is never subversive.

(White quotes a passage from Capote's writings) Here we have the pairs of balanced opposites (elegant and tune less, shabby and rich, wraithlike and eternal, comfortable and severe) that serve to stabilize, even freeze character which, moreover, is read through the house and its furnishings.

To interpret the self from its possessions is the great nineteenth~century fictional method (and a bourgeois habit of mind). Earlier novels described actions, not belongings; later novels dramatized inner conflicts, so often at odds with the milieu. That Capote found such a tight fit between his characters and their settings reflected his nostalgia for the traditional society of the Old South. His first novellas Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Grass Harp take place in that South of small towns and big pretensions, of genteel manners and savage prejudices.

Capote shuffled out of the room again. I, too, stood up, as though to throw off the heat squatting on me like a nightmare in a Fuseli painting. Art and fashion books sat in the sort of stylish piles decorators used to distribute around rooms to give them a studied ‘casual’ look. The bookshelf itself contained mostly various editions and translations of Capote’s own titles. Puppies, kittens and cobras seemed to be the dominant motifs everywhere' (Now I’m interpreting Capote from his belongings). As I strolled about I spotted other puppies, kittens and snakes on desks, woven into pillows, resting on the window-sill fitting emblems, I suppose, for a man who celebrated domestic love in ‘A Christmas Memory’ and has written the most detailed modern chronicle of murder, In Cold Blood. A dozen calla lilies fresh from the florist crowned the coffee table, but the geraniums along the window looked parched, neglected, a bachelor’s plants. .

When Capote re-emerged a minute later he’d picked up vitality. The photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, and his assistant arrived, and Capote and I posed for our picture against a Japanese painting of fish. ‘The Japanese, of course, didn’t paint in oils for the longest time,’ Capote explained. ‘This one, which was done in the nineteenth century, is one of the first oils. The artists reached the 'height and then, naturally, committed suicide. All the best Japanese artists commit suicide.’

Mapplethorpe told us to look at each other, at the window, at him and we did so rather stiffly as though we were puppets gloving arthritic hands. The sweat flowed freely over our bodies. Although Capote, as he told all the world, was homosexual, he seemed not even faintly interested in either the handsome Mapplethorpe or in his friend, Marcus Leatherdale, who resembles James Dean. Not the faintest sexual interest, that is; he does express his admiration of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Capote let out a sigh and stood: ‘I can’t take it. I can’t be photographed one second more,’ and he hurried down the hall for the third time in twenty minutes.

Mapplethorpe and his friend left. I ambled around the living room and stopped to examine two decorative windows placed on the facing wall. The borders were painted with fruits and birds and the inner surface was studded with abstract shades of tinted glass and mirror. ‘The Shah of Iran gave those to me,’ Capote told me as he returned. ‘They’re very old and valuable national treasures. I’m terrified the Ayatollah will send someone to recover them.’ ,

Capote was now doing a sort of fan dance, listlessly waving his Palmetto and slowly jogging in place. He dropped his fan and rubbed his stomach in long strokes.
In the extant chapters of Answered Prayers, he depicts some of the jumbled elements of his own life (much as Nabokov does in Look at the Harlequins!). The results were so scandalous, the clefs rattled so noisily, that Capote lacked the courage to press on. Drink and drugs dimmed his lights. The book’s jet-set milieu, however, which he’d first touched on in ‘Greek Paragraphs’, a minor travel piece, appealed to his temperament. At last he was free from his sexless youths and corrupted adults, his fairy-tale romances and objective reportage. 

The rich have the means to realize their whims and the effrontery to avow their desires. Sex, travel, gambling and intrigue are their sports, while their itineraries and adulteries provide them with conversation, just as loyalty to the clan, devotion to fashion and the display of perfect manners constitute their virtues. Above all, jet-setters love a good story. Too bad Capote didn’t stay sober long enough to betray his friends more thoroughly.

To find the psychic energy to pursue a long career, it seems to

c, a writer must juggle between a Vigorous, recording curiosny “gout the world and how it works and the ongoing process of :elf.creati0n. It is the imagination, of course, that negotiates be/ tween reality and the ego, between the repetition compulsion and the pleasure principle. If the self is utterly eliminated we end up with journalism: if the ego is shamelessly gratified, we have the [angueurs of the intimate journal. If both the self and the world are held at bay and the imagination is given free reign, then the result would be pure fantasy or tedious sci-fi. The successful novel cleverly adjudicates among these temptations and somehow combines newspaper story, confession and fairy tale.

Capote’s most successful response to these various claims is Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a sort of rewrite of Isherwood’s Berlin stories. Holly Golightly plays Sally Bowles, the impoverished and sexless young Capote stands in for the similarly disabled Herr Issivoo, and in both books the various eccentrics, lovable or menacing, parade past like vaudeville performers doing their exotic ‘turns’. Both Sally and Holly are at once wish-fulfilment and object-lesson, real girls and gay boys in drag, as well as innocents playing at adult vice. In both Capote’s and Isherwood’s tales the results make for very seductive reading.

He excused himself, but when he returned this time he didn’t seem livelier but dangerously fatigued. I started to leave. ‘I’ve been very anxious,’ he said. ‘It’s something that’s been hanging over me for two and a half years. Partly professional and partly personal. I thought it was over, but it isn’t. That’s why I’m so nervous. I can’t tell you about it it’s a secret. But when you do eventually learn about it, then you’ll understand why it’s been so hard for me to finish Answered Prayers. Everything will come clear then.’