A Scribner Scion Sets the Record Straight on Fitzgerald and Hemingway

‘Artists & Authors: A Life in Good Company’By Charles Scribner IIILyons Press, 200 pagesThe scion of a famous publishing family and a Princeton educated art historian, Charles Scribner III, provides a fascinating look at the lives and works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Caravaggio, Rubens, and Bernini. Along the way, he also provides shrewd commentary on biography as practiced by certain academics who reveal a profound ignorance about the way publishers and their authors interact, and on the academy itself, which, until fairly recently, has done little to foster a full understanding how writers’ lives are shaped by the business of publishing.A case in point: “When [F. Scott] Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, first approached the Princeton University Library and offered to donate her father’s papers, she was turned down. It couldn’t be the repository, the librarian said, for every failed alumnus author’s papers,” Mr. Scribner reports. Fortunately, she persisted and Princeton relented. Now Fitzgerald’s archive has become a pilgrimage site for scholars.Mr. Scribner corrects a common misapprehension that as Fitzgerald’s popularity declined in the 1940s, his work went out of print. On the contrary, the publisher had plenty of Fitzgerald’s books warehoused. There just wasn’t a demand then. Several generations of Scribners understood Fitzgerald’s importance well before the academic establishment did, beginning in the mid-1950s as a new generation of readers hailed “The Great Gatsby” as a classic.Hemingway, notorious for rejecting editorial guidance, was receptive to the criticisms of Mr. Scribner’s grandfather: “Hemingway thought of him not as a literary type — a man of letters — but as a horseman.” This was key to the enduring friendship between author and publisher. Grandfather Scribner was “the only one who could persuade him [Hemingway] to make changes, as he would do on . . . ‘Across the River and into the Trees,’” which originally contained “some highly offensive passages” depicting ex-wife Martha Gellhorn.Mr. Scribner describes a scholar “seeking my permission to quote from family letters; she was convinced she had found in those letters the ‘smoking gun’ that my grandfather and Martha Gellhorn had had an affair.” Hemingway had said, “Martha sends her love, whatever that means,” and Mr. Scribner’s reply that “she doesn’t blame either of us.” cinched it for the scholar who could not be convinced that the two men were joking.Mr. Scribner’s father did not try to continue that degree of familiarity pertaining between grandfather Scribner and Hemingway, realizing that the writer “admired people who had a trade and stuck to it. That decided me: I would be a professional publisher.”Mr. Scribner links his own experience with the personalities of artists in the same way as he does with writers. Thom Gunn, poet in residence during Mr. Scribner’s freshman year at Princeton, introduced him to a Caravaggio painting. Mr. Scribner adds parenthetically: “(Gunn was himself a Caravaggesque figure of the leather-and-motorcycle set),” and then mentions Gunn’s poem, “The Unsettled Motorcyclist’s Vision of His Death.”Like Gunn introducing Mr. Scribner to Caravaggio’s work, “the young Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens . . . arranged for his patron, the Duke of Mantua, to purchase [Caravaggio’s] ‘Death of the Virgin’” — but only after a public viewing in Rome demanded by fellow artists. The biographies of artists and authors have a way of melding together in Mr. Scribner’s “life in good company.”‘Artists & Authors: A Life in Good Company,’ by Charles Scribner III. Lyons PressMr. Scribner’s concentration on successful artists’ lives and works reflects his dismay at the modern penchant for identifying with the struggling artist: “Our age prefers to locate genius in a tormented Michelangelo, a rebellious Caravaggio, or a reclusive Rembrandt. Hollywood has yet to project Rubens’s or Bernini’s lives onto the screen. Yet together they reveal the epic, heroic qualities of men who towered over their time and indeed over the entire history of art.”As successful and worldly artists, Rubens and Bernini did not “starve in their pursuit of art,” Mr. Scribner avers, but “as a result, they—and their enlightened patrons — provided visual feasts that may never lose their freshness nor ever fail to satisfy.”Let me pique your interest by quoting a few chapter titles: “Rubens Meets Miami Vice” and “The Garden of Love.” There’s also a nice little story about Thomas Wolfe eating dog food, but I won’t spoil it for you.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn” and writes about Rembrandt and Rubens in “Essays in Biography.”

A Scribner Scion Sets the Record Straight on Fitzgerald and Hemingway

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