Book Review: Scribners Five Generations in Publishing, by Charles Scribner III (2023)

The lovely cover of Scribners Five Generations in Publishing, by Charles Scribner III, 2023. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The inscription from Charles Scribner III inside my copy. We connected over F. Scott Fitzgerald's play The Vegetable, surprisingly enough! (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The distinguished publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons was founded in 1846. For fans of Jazz Age literature, Scribners is probably best known as being the publishing home of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. In 2023, Charles Scribner III published Scribners Five Generations of Publishing, a history of the company. Charles Scribner III is the fifth Charles Scribner to work for the family firm, and he and his father oversaw the merger of Scribner’s with Macmillan in 1984. (The Scribner imprint is now a division of Simon & Schuster.) 

Scribners Five Generations of Publishing is a fascinating look at the challenges and rewards of book publishing. Scribners has had more than its fair share of famous authors, from Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill, J.M. Barrie, Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, the aforementioned triumvirate of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe, to Charles Lindbergh and P.D. James. Scribner shares personal stories about many of these authors, passed down from his father and grandfather.  

I knew I would enjoy reading this book when I read Charles’ description of Henry James: “James is a difficult author to read—beyond my patience—but of towering importance to the history of literature.” (p.29) My sentiments exactly.  

Charles Scribner III is a great admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing, as am I, and I found his paragraph about Fitzgerald to be an excellent summary of Fitzgerald’s brilliance: 

“There is something magical about Fitzgerald...the real magic lies embedded in the prose, and reveals itself in his amazing range and versatility. Each novel or story partakes of its creator’s poetic imagination, his dramatic vision, his painstaking (if virtuoso and seemingly effortless) craftsmanship. Each bears Fitzgerald’s hallmark: the indelible stamp of grace. He is my literary candidate to stand beside the demigods Bernini, Rubens, and Mozart as artists of divine transfigurations.” (p.45)  

Needless to say, I concur with Scribner’s assessment of Fitzgerald. There is indeed a magic that surrounds his sparkling prose. Scribner also aptly describes Fitzgerald’s duality: “Just as his life bridged two centuries, so does his work have a Janus-like aspect, looking back to the Romantic lyricism and epic dreams of nineteenth-century America and forward to the syncopated jazz of the twentieth.” (p.43)  

Thanks to his family connections, Scribner provides us with a portrait of Ernest Hemingway that allows us a glimpse at another side of this literary legend. Scribner quotes from the moving letter that Hemingway wrote to his father after his grandfather’s death. Hemingway called Charles’s grandfather “the best and closest friend that I had.” Shortly before Hemingway’s own death, he entrusted Charles’s father with his last will and testament, a tribute that speaks volumes about the close relationship between the author and his publisher.  

There are other fascinating tidbits as well: Charles’s father considered Charles Lindbergh “the fussiest author he ever had to deal with.” (p.97) Lindbergh was so controlling that he measured the space around punctuation marks! Although I guess that isn’t too surprising, given Lindbergh’s notorious attention to detail. When he was preparing for his historic solo flight across the Atlantic, Lindbergh trimmed all of the white space off of his maps and papers, in an effort to save as much weight as possible.  

Throughout the book, one feels something of the sense of obligation and duty that the Scribner family did to keep the publishing house going. There’s an admirable lack of ego that runs through all 5 of the Charles Scribner’s, and the other Scribners who led the firm. Charles Scribner II had a deep disdain for “the vertical pronoun,” as he called it, once circling all the capital I’s on a memo. (p.31)  

Charles’s father is an excellent example of putting family duty over personal glory. A brilliant academic, he had to turn away from academia when the family business needed him after World War II. Ultimately, he turned his commitment to scholarly work into editing many of the reference works that Scribner’s published during his leadership.  

Charles’s father is also the source of two of my own favorite quotations from the book: “You can always tell a moral question because it makes you feel so rotten.” (p.100) And his bon mot when author James Jones left Scribners for another publisher: “My disappointment is under control.” (p.117) 

We also learn from Charles that his piano playing skills might have contributed to Scottie Fitzgerald’s decision to keep Scribner’s as the publisher of her father’s works. In the late 1970’s, thanks to changes in copyright laws, Scottie and her adviser, Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, were looking at the possibility of changing publishers. When Scottie arrived at the Scribner’s office for a meeting with Charles and his father, she saw the piano in Charles’s office and asked him to play her something. He played his favorite Chopin waltz. “Halfway through it, I had the chilling thought that Fitzgerald’s future at Scribners might depend on this waltz.” After Charles finished playing, Scottie sighed and said, “It’s all so romantic.” (p.153) And so the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald remained with Scribners, his only publisher in the United States.  

Scribners Five Generations in Publishing is a lovely testament to books and literature, and it is a reminder of a bygone era, when a book publisher made decisions based not just on how many units they could sell, but on the talent of young, unproven authors. If you love the world of books, you’ll enjoy Scribners Five Generations in Publishing.  

Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli with Judith S. Baughman (1996)

The cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, with Judith S. Baughman, 1996. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship is a 1996 collection that aimed to assemble Fitzgerald’s writings and letters in which he described the creative process. For diehard Fitzgerald fans, it’s an essential title as it collects many disparate pieces of Fitzgerald’s writing. During Fitzgerald’s lifetime, his intelligence and seriousness as a writer were often denigrated. (Edmund Wilson, I’m looking at you!) A collection like F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship is an attempt, in part, to better place Fitzgerald as a craftsman who was serious about his work. For anyone who has studied Fitzgerald’s work, it’s obvious he was serious about his writing. He wouldn’t have been able to create such beautiful short stories and novels if he wasn’t serious.  

Fitzgerald wrote a number of book reviews in the early 1920’s, and these are instructive in learning what the young author thought about books written by his contemporaries. Fitzgerald was quick to recognize the talent of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. After 1925, Fitzgerald wrote very few book reviews, but he wrote about being an author in several autobiographical pieces from the 1930’s like “One Hundred False Starts,” “Author’s House,” “Afternoon of an Author,” and “Early Success.” He also wrote the very funny short story “Financing Finnegan,” which satirized his own problems with money.  

Throughout F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, the Fitzgerald buff will find passages of interest. One of my own favorite finds was this, in Fitzgerald’s review of his friend Thomas Boyd’s 1923 novel Through the Wheat: “No one has a greater contempt than I have for the recent hysteria about the Nordic theory...” (p.88) What does this have to do with anything? This gives us some proof that Fitzgerald was satirizing Tom Buchanan’s noxious views of race in The Great Gatsby. It seems clear from the novel that Fitzgerald is satirizing Tom, but here we have F. Scott Fitzgerald saying so, not under the cover of the fictional Nick Carraway, but in his own voice.  

It’s clear how much Fitzgerald admired Joseph Conrad from many passages in the book. Fitzgerald wrote prophetically in 1923 that Conrad’s novel Nostromo was “The great novel of the past fifty years, as Ulysses is the great novel of the future.” (p.86) 

As always with Fitzgerald, there are passages of wonderful beauty. Consider this sentence, from a 1934 letter to H.L. Mencken: “It is simply that having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.” (p.138)  

There’s also a heart wrenching letter from 1938 that Scott wrote to his daughter Scottie. Scott judges his marriage to Zelda quite harshly in the letter: “You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But I was a man divided—she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was dignity and the only dignity and tried to atone for it by working herself but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.” (p.170) It’s fascinating that Scott seems to blame Zelda for distracting him from his dream of being a writer. This was also one of Ernest Hemingway’s criticisms of Zelda, put forth decades later in his posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast. And it’s fascinating that Scott’s last sentence is so reminiscent of Hemingway’s rhythms, with the long sentence connected with “and.”  

For Fitzgerald fans who are interested in learning more about Fitzgerald’s own thoughts on writing and literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship is a must read.  

Book Review: The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain (2011)

 

Paperback cover of The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, 2011. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Hadley and Ernest Hemingway

Author Paula McLain

When I started my latest Ernest Hemingway kick by reading A Moveable Feast, I knew I’d have to read 5 books: the 1964 version of A Moveable Feast, the 2009 “restored” edition of A Moveable Feast, A.E. Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love, Scott Donaldson’s The Paris Husband, and Paula McLain’s 2011 novel The Paris Wife. Now I’ve finished all 5 books, and I can move on with my life and continue reading about my other obsessions, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe, Dick Tracy, and baseball.

The Paris Wife tells the story of Ernest Hemingway’s relationship with Hadley Richardson, his first wife, from their first meeting in 1920 to their divorce in 1927. It’s written in the first person, from Hadley’s point of view, and Paula McLain does a terrific job of capturing Hadley’s spirit.

McLain never attempts to imitate Hemingway’s distinctive writing style, and that’s a wise decision. There are a few short sections written from Ernest’s point of view, but they’re all written in the third person, not the first person, and they work well as part of the novel.

A challenge about writing about this time in Hemingway’s life is that almost all his friends were famous writers as well. How do you render realistic dialogue for Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald? McLain doesn’t exactly imitate these writers, but she does an excellent job of capturing their essence as she describes them and presents us with dialogue they could realistically have spoken. At their first meeting, McLain has Fitzgerald say to Hemingway about Jay Gatsby, “I know him so well, it’s as if he’s my child. He’s dead and I’m still worried about him.” (p.202) I think it would be very much in Fitzgerald’s character to feel that way about Gatsby.

The Paris Wife offers a convincing portrayal of the young Ernest Hemingway, with all of his charisma and all of his faults on display. Hemingway had a habit throughout his life of breaking off friendships, and McLain nails this tendency in several passages. Early in the novel, McLain writes of Hemingway “sacrificing {a} friendship as if it meant nothing.” (p.67) Hemingway’s own exacting standards for other people meant that “Once you were tarnished for him, he could never see you any other way.” (p.149) This becomes a problem for Hadley in late 1922, when she leaves Paris to meet Ernest in Switzerland and a valise she had filled with his writings gets stolen at the train station. On this same journey, Hadley also inadvertently left her diaphragm behind in Paris. Needless to say, Ernest was not thrilled about either of these developments.

Hadley is attuned to Ernest’s strong individualism, as McLain writes “It was so hard to watch Ernest pushing these mentors away, as if striking deep blows was the only way to prove to himself (and everyone else) that he’d never really needed them in the first place.” (p.241) Exactly! This is the tone that Hemingway takes throughout A Moveable Feast, one of arrogant superiority towards every other artist. It comes across in Hemingway’s accounts of his early encounters with Fitzgerald, with Hemingway denigrating Fitzgerald’s working habits, when at the time—Spring 1925—Fitzgerald had published three novels, two books of short stories, and a play, and Hemingway had published two very short books with a tiny independent press, and no books in the United States.

The Paris Wife is a beautiful novel, and a tribute to those often unknown people who stand beside and behind great artists, and oftentimes take a lot of abuse in the process. Finally, in The Paris Wife, Hadley gets her proper due.