Liesl Schillinger on what to reread this summer and why

Guest blog post by Liesl Schillinger, New York-based writer, literary critic, and creator of the whimsical neologisms blog wordbirds

I’m about to go on my first true vacation this year, to an island in the middle of a lake where there’s no Internet and no electricity. In the daytime, our light comes from the sun; at nightfall, from oil lanterns whose glow extends halfway across our birch-bough beds. As a literary critic, I read at all times; but on holiday, I indulge in the pleasure of rereading. And since the Adirondacks (where I’ll be) are steeped in this country’s mythic past, I’ll be bringing American authors with me to reread. Here are the ones I’ll be dipping into, while the light lasts:

Edith Wharton. When I first read Wharton’s The House of Mirth, at 16, I loved this book and rued Lily Bart’s cruel fate. Reading it decades later, I was struck instead by the cruelty of Wharton’s social world and by her heroine’s bottomless venality. Wharton’s Collected Stories tend to be breezier and better-humored than her longer work (though still a little wicked), and I’ll be diving back into them—particularly “Charm Incorporated,” a story about a businessman who marries a beguiling immigrant whom the reader imagines to be a gold-digger, but who in fact rescues her husband’s fortunes.

John Dos Passos. What Carl Sandburg did with poetry for Chicago, Dos Passos did with prose for New York. In his tour de force, Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos wrote with striking, cinematic visual imagery, using dialogue (mostly) to convey a living, breathing portrait of Manhattan in the first two decades of the last century. Though Dos Passos includes the wealthy among his characters, he gives unusual voice to working American men, women and immigrants. Like Sandburg, who defended ordinary citizens in his long cycle, The People, Yes, Dos Passos championed the working man, and he ought to be more forcefully championed by those who admire Hemingway, Steinbeck and the modern novel.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many people reread The Great Gatsby. But the Fitzgerald novel that haunts me is Tender Is the Night, in which he transmits love’s poignancy more evocatively than just about anyone else. And his passage about Nicole’s Paris shopping trip is my favorite run-on sentence of all time: “For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve . . .” Best read when one is far from toil . . . say, on a dock in the afternoon, as the first gin and tonics come around.

Kurt Vonnegut. Growing up in Indiana (Vonnegut’s home state), I got to take an eccentric class in high school devoted to Vonnegut’s oeuvre—taught by a wry, obese teacher who resembled (I thought) Vonnegut’s portly “Mr. Rosewater.” I must have read Cat's Cradle—Vonnegut’s parable of connection and empathy in the age of mass destruction—five times. I have also reread Slaughterhouse-Five, his stories Welcome to the Monkey House, and even his wacky, cartoon-filled Breakfast of Champions. His books are mosaics studded with fertile, glinting thoughts and images, always worth poring over again, always producing a fresh impression.

Anne Tyler. I consider some of the novels Anne Tyler wrote in the 1970s and 1980s to be American classics: Searching for Caleb, The Accidental Tourist, and, my favorite, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (about a dysfunctional family, before that term came into wide use). Understated humor runs through her books like a stream among the rushes: in one novel, a woman drives a car that’s missing a door; after she parks it, another character rips an ad from a magazine and tapes it to the frame: "Wouldn’t You Really Rather Have a Buick?" Later, she pops a piece of candy into her mouth from a bowl on a coffee table, only to realize it’s made of glass. This is American vision, American nuance, told in American language. And even Tyler’s sharpest observations have a generous, merciful quality to them, elevating her writing above satire or tale-telling.

John Updike. Rabbit runs, Rabbit gets reduxed, and Rabbit is reread; but the Updike novel I’m drawn to over and over is his stately retelling of the American century through the multi-generational saga In the Beauty of the Lilies. Written in 1996, this book begins in the rural, decent small-town America we associate with Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart, and progresses relentlessly but organically to the media-oversaturated 90s, by which time an uncentered population has lost its context, and a neglected boy (who is nonetheless somebody’s son) joins a Waco-like cult, and shakes off its spell too late. The confident breadth of Updike’s span inspires awe. It’s an ideal book to wrap up at sunset . . . before returning for reassurance and warmth to the companionship of friends and family around the campfire.

Also of interest:

• The Guardian helps you plan your summer "greatest non-fiction" reading, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• After a vacation a few years ago Liesl Schillinger compiled a musical playlist inspired by her reading
• Listen to Carl Sandburg read “The people, yes, the people”

Related LOA works: Edith Wharton: Novels, Novellas, Stories, and Other Writings; John Dos Passos: Novels 1920-1925; Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems; Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973

F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack in Hollywood seventy years ago today

In 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald was in his fourth year working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, although with fewer assignments and less pay. He hoped the novel he was working on, The Love of the Last Tycoon, would revive his literary reputation. Few people were still reading him. His August 1940 royalty statement from Scribner’s reported sales of forty copies of his works (including seven copies of The Great Gatsby and nine of Tender Is the Night) for a total payment of $13.13.

The writer he introduced to his editor Maxwell Perkins in 1925 was the current rage. Ernest Hemingway’s latest novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, would sell more than 270,000 copies in its first year. Fitzgerald had received a copy inscribed “To Scott with affection and esteem Ernest” and responded with a note on November 8:

Congratulations on your new book’s great success. I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this. I always liked Dostoeifski (sic) with his wide appeal more than any other European—and I envy you the time it will give you to do what you want.

Fitzgerald’s notebooks record a different opinion: “a thoroughly superficial book which has all the profundity of Rebecca.” The Love of the Last Tycoon would be quite different:

I want to write scenes that are frightening and inimitable. I don’t want to be as intelligible to my contemporaries as Ernest who as Gertrude Stein said, is bound for the Museums. I am sure that I am far enough ahead to have some small immortality if I can keep well.

That same month Fitzgerald received a scare when he had a mild heart attack in Schwab’s Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard. His doctor ordered him to stay in bed. Fitzgerald was then living on the top floor of a three-story walkup. To avoid the stairs, he moved into the ground-floor apartment of his lover, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.

His estranged wife Zelda was then living with her mother in Montgomery, Alabama. Fitzgerald wrote her weekly. His December 13 letter read:

The novel is about three quarters through and I think I can go on till January 12 without doing any stories or going back to the studio. I couldn’t go back to the studio anyhow in my present condition as I have to spend most of my time in bed where I write on a wooden desk. . . The cardiogram shows that my heart is repairing itself but it will be a gradual process that will take some months. It is odd that the heart is one of the organs that does repair itself.

As biographer Matthew Bruccoli recounts in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Fitzgerald suffered a dizzy spell following the premiere of a new film he and Graham attended on December 20. Because his physician was coming to see him the next afternoon, Fitzgerald chose not to see a doctor. Reading about the German-Italian pact in the newspapers the next morning, Fitzgerald told Graham that he’d like to cover the war from Europe after he had completed his novel. “Ernest won’t have that field all to himself, then.” Moments later he started from his chair, clutched the mantelpiece and fell to the floor. Graham called the fire department. Fitzgerald was pronounced dead at 5:15 p.m. of coronary occlusion. He had completed the first draft of five of the projected nine chapters of his new novel. He was forty-four years old.

Also of interest:

• Read more about Fitzgerald’s last days at The Writer’s Almanac
• Read about Fitzgerald’s last dinner party with Nathanael West on December 13, 1940, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Read “The Cut-Glass Bowl” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, an LOA Story of the Week
• Listen to Garrison Keillor’s tribute to Fitzgerald at the 25th anniversary celebration of The Library of America

Related LOA works: F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories 1920–1922

Maxwell Perkins: editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell, and Thomas Wolfe

Today is the 126th birthday of publishing legend Maxwell Perkins. In a career spanning thirty-six years as an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Perkins discovered and published three of the giants of twentieth-century literature: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. He inspired a mostly unswerving loyalty in his authors. No editor has ever had more books dedicated to him—68 at the time of his death. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, A. Scott Berg explains why:

His literary judgment was original and exceedingly astute, and he was famous for his ability to inspire an author to produce the best that was in him or her. More a friend to his authors than a taskmaster, he aided them in every way. He helped them structure their books, if help was needed; thought up titles, invented plots; he served as psychologist, lovelorn adviser, marriage counselor, career manager, money-lender. Few editors before him had done so much work on manuscripts, yet he was always faithful to his credo, “The book belongs to the author.”

Perkins seemed to have known what he wanted from the start. In 1910, after a short stint as a reporter at The New York Times, the 24-year-old Perkins became an advertising manager at Scribner’s, esteemed publisher of the likes of Edith Wharton, John Galsworthy, and Henry James. Within five years he moved up to editor; four years later he made his first career-making find. A manuscript, The Romantic Egoist, a first novel by a 22-year-old Princeton grad, arrived on his desk with negative comments from every other reader. But Perkins saw something he liked. He had to cajole F. Scott Fitzgerald into rewriting the manuscript twice before he could persuade Scribner’s to publish it. Perkins’s winning argument, as recorded by Berg, resonates with every editor who has ever pushed passionately for a book: “If we aren’t going to publish a talent like this, it is a very serious thing,” Perkins reasoned. Fitzgerald would find another publisher, young authors would follow him and, Perkins warned, “Then we might as well go out of business.”

This Side of Paradise was published on March 26, 1920 with advertising citing Fitzgerald as “the youngest writer for whom Scribner’s has ever published a novel.” It became Scriber’s biggest seller of the season, selling almost 35,000 copies in its first seven months. In The Smart Set H. L. Mencken hailed it as “a truly amazing first novel—original in structure, extremely sophisticated in manner, and adorned with brilliancy that is as rare in American writing as honesty is in American statecraft.”

Perkins was right that other young writers would follow. In 1924 Fitzgerald tipped Perkins off to a “young American living in France who wrote for the transatlantic review” and two years later Perkins would publish 27-year-old Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Two years later Perkins would be the only editor in New York to discern in the hundreds upon hundreds of manuscript pages of O Lost the novel Scribner’s would publish as Look Homeward, Angel by 27-year-old Thomas Wolfe.

Many other authors benefited from the Perkins magic. When acid-penned novelist Dawn Powell left Farrar & Rinehart in 1939, working with Perkins led to her first commercially successful novel, A Time To Be Born, perhaps most notorious because its central character is based loosely on playwright-journalist-socialite Claire Booth Luce. Perkins was prescient about Powell’s staying power: when she died in 1965 nearly all of her books were out of print; then in the 1980s and 1990s she enjoyed a lively rediscovery.

In the course of his career Perkins would edit many other authors of renown: Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Taylor Caldwell, Marcia Davenport, Martha Gellhorn, James Jones, Ring Lardner, J. P. Marquand, Alan Paton, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Edmund Wilson, and more. Writers who worked with Perkins distinguish his approach from editors who rewrite or excise an author’s work. “He never tells you what to do,” Roger Burlingame explained to Malcolm Cowley for a New Yorker profile of Perkins. “Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”

Perkins is soon due to return to the public eye in a major way: Sean Penn is slated to portray him in a new biopic based on Berg’s biography. And he continues to be the touchstone figure for what an editor can do for an author. Just last week Joshua Wolf Shenk invoked his example in his essay for Slate about the science of creativity.

Related LOA works: F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories 1920-1922; Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942

Nathanael West as online muse

In his brief life Nathanael West wrote four darkly comic novels, two of them acclaimed masterpieces: Miss Lonelyhearts, a devastating portrait of a newspaper columnist overwhelmed by his readers’ sufferings, and The Day of the Locusts, an apocalyptic vision of the underside of the Hollywood dream. In a prescient article for The Boston Phoenix in 1997 Virginia Heffernan wrote “[West] seems to have become a writer, like Frank Norris or Djuna Barnes, whose work is periodically 'revived,' appreciated, and explained, and then returned to the hands of more stalwart fans.” Based on recent evidence a sustained revival of Nathanael West seems to be at hand.

For one, West today has his own Twitter account. Marion Meade, author of Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, a dual biography of West and his wife, hosts both the Twitter account (in West's voice) and http://www.nathanaelwest.com/, a site devoted in equal parts to West, McKenney, and the book, and featuring a good deal of trivia and media about the couple.

Joe Woodward’s blog, The Nathanael West Project, chronicles on an almost daily basis his writing of a biography of West. Last week he posted a lengthy rumination for 3:AM Magazine, which included a description of the fateful last dinner party at West’s home in North Hollywood on Friday, December 13, 1940. That night West and McKenney hosted F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheila Graham, Dorothy Parker, the screenwriters Albert and Frances Hackett, and the artist Hilaire Hiler.

No one at the party that night could have known it, but it was the last time any of them would see F. Scott Fitzgerald or Nathanael West alive. Fitzgerald would never finish The Last Tycoon and never see the whole of his Pat Hobby short story cycle published. And West, he would never get beyond the start of that fifth novel. The following weekend they would both be gone. Scott would die at the age of 44, the following Saturday, of a heart attack while reading the Princeton alumni magazine, and West, at 37, and his new wife Eileen, at 27, would die in a horrific car accident in the middle of the California desert.

A 1932 editorial in Americana, the short-lived magazine West co-edited with the Dadaist George Grosz, proclaimed. “We are the laughing morticians of the present.” This may help explain why West’s Wikipedia entry is one of the few with a link to Findagrave, a website where visitors can locate the graves of more than 4,000 writers and commemorate them with virtual flowers and comments.

On a livelier note, many clips are surfacing online of West’s screenwriting efforts, giving glimpses of his mordant style. Fans of Lost may enjoy the trailer for one of West’s last screenplays, Five Came Back (1939). Lucille Ball’s badinage in this clip from the same movie has a Westian flair. And Peter Lorre seems the perfect vehicle for West’s offhanded menace in Stranger on the Third Floor.

Related LOA works: Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings; Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology