Perkins took off his sopping raincoat and revealed an unpressed, pepper-and-salt, three-piece suit. Then his eyes shot upward and he removed his hat, under which a full head of metallic-gray hair was combed straight back fromaVin the center of his forehead. Max Perkins did not care much about the impression he gave, which was just as well, for the first one he made on this particular evening was of some Vermont feed-and-grain merchant who had come to the city in his Sunday clothes and got caught in the rain. As he walked to the front of the room, he seemed slightly bewildered, and more so as Kenneth McCormick introduced him as “the dean of American editors.”
Perkins had never spoken to a group like this before. Every year he received dozens of invitations, but he turned them all down. For one thing, he had become somewhat deaf and tended to avoid groups. For another, he believed that book editors should remain invisible; public recognition of them, he felt, might undermine readers’ faith in writers, and writers’ confidence in themselves. Moreover, Perkins had never seen any point in discussing his career—until McCormick’s invitation. Kenneth McCormick, one of the most able and best-liked people in publishing, who himself practiced Perkins’s philosophy of editorial self-effacement, was a hard man to refuse. Or perhaps Perkins sensed how much fatigue and sorrow had subtracted from his own longevity and felt he had better pass along what he knew before it was too late.
Hooking his thumbs comfortably into the armholes of his waistcoat, speaking in his slightly rasping, well-bred voice, Perkins began. “The first thing you must remember,” he said, without quite facing his audience: “An editor does not add to a book. At best he serves as a handmaiden to an author. Don’t ever get to feeling important about yourself, because an editor at most releases energy. He creates nothing.” Perkins admitted that he had suggested books to authors who had no ideas of their own at the moment, but he maintained that such works were usually below their best, though they were sometimes financially and even critically successful. “A writer’s best work,” he said, “comes entirely from himself.” He warned the students against any effort by an editor to inject his own point of view into a writer’s work or to try to make him something other than what he is. “The process is so simple,” he said. “If you have a Mark Twain, don’t try to make him into a Shakespeare or make a Shakespeare into a Mark Twain. Because in the end an editor can get only as much out of an author as the author has in him.”
Perkins spoke carefully, with that hollow timbre of the hard-of-hearing, as if he were surprised at the sound of his own voice. At first the audience had to strain to hear him, but within minutes they had become so still that his every syllable was quite audible. They sat listening intently to the diffident editor talking about the electrifying challenges of his work—the search for what he kept calling “the real thing.”
Once Perkins had concluded his prepared remarks, Kenneth McCormick asked the class for questions. “What was it like to work with F. Scott Fitzgerald?” was the first.
A fragile smile floated across Perkins’s face as he thought for a moment. Then he replied, “Scott was always the gentleman. Sometimes he needed extra support—and sobering up—but the writing was so rich it was worth it.” Perkins went on to say that Fitzgerald was comparatively simple to edit because he was a perfectionist about his work and wanted it to be right. However, Perkins added, “Scott was especially sensitive to criticism. He could accept it, but as his editor you had to be sure of everything you suggested.”
The discussion turned to Ernest Hemingway. Perkins said Hemingway needed backing in the beginning of his career, and even more later, “because he wrote as daringly as he lived.” Perkins believed Hemingway’s writing displayed that virtue of his heroes, “grace under pressure.” Hemingway, he said, was susceptible to overcorrecting himself. “He once told me that he had written parts of A Farewell to Arms fifty times,” Perkins said. “Before an author destroys the natural qualities of his writing—that’s when an editor has to step in. But not a moment sooner.”
Perkins shared stories about working with Erskine Caldwell, then commented on several of his best-selling women novelists, including Taylor Caldwell, Marcia Davenport, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. At last, as though the class had been reluctant to raise a tender subject, came questions about the late Thomas Wolfe, from whom Perkins had become estranged. Most of the inquiries for the rest of the evening concerned Perkins’s intense involvement with Wolfe, the most arduous endeavor of his career. For years it had been widely rumored that Wolfe and Perkins had been equal partners in producing Wolfe’s sprawling novels. “Tom,” he said, “was a man of enormous talent, genius. That talent, like his view of America, was so vast that neither one book nor a single lifetime could contain all that he had to say.” As Wolfe transposed his world into fiction, Perkins had felt it was his responsibility to create certain boundaries—of length and form. He said, “These were practical conventions that Wolfe couldn’t stop to think about for himself.”
“But did Wolfe take your suggestions gracefully?” someone asked.
Perkins laughed for the first time that evening. He told of the time, at the midpoint of their relationship, when he had tried to get Wolfe to delete a big section of Of Time and the River. “It was late on a hot night, and we were working at the office. I put my case to him and then sat in silence, reading on in the manuscript.” Perkins had known Wolfe would eventually agree to the deletion because the reasons for it were artistically sound. But Wolfe would not give in easily. He tossed his head about and swayed in his chair, while his eyes roved over Perkins’s sparsely furnished office. “I went on reading in the manuscript for not less than fifteen minutes,” Max continued, “but I was aware of Tom’s movements—aware at last that he was looking fixedly at one corner of the office. In that corner hung my hat and overcoat, and down from under the hat, along the coat, hung a sinister rattlesnake skin with seven rattles.” It was a present from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Max looked at Tom, who was glaring at the hat, coat, and serpent. “Aha!” Wolfe exclaimed. “The portrait of an editor!” Having had his little joke, Wolfe then agreed to the deletion.
A few of the questions from the would-be publishers that evening had to be repeated so that Perkins could hear them. There were long, puzzling silences in his speech. He answered the questions eloquently, but in between them his mind seemed to wander among a thousand different remembrances. “Max seemed to be going into a private world of his own thoughts,” McCormick said years later, “making interior, private associations, as though he had entered a little room and closed the door behind him.” All in all it was a memorable performance, and the class sat mesmerized. The rural Yankee who had stumbled in out of the rain hours earlier had transformed himself before them into the very legend of their imaginings.
Shortly after nine o‘clock, McCormick notified Perkins of the time so that Max could catch his train. It seemed a shame to stop. He had not even mentioned his experiences with novelists Sherwood Anderson, J. P. Marquand, Morley Callaghan, Hamilton Basso; he had not spoken of biographer Douglas Southall Freeman, or Edmund Wilson, or Allen Tate, or Alice Roosevelt Longworth or Nancy Hale. It was too late to talk about Joseph Stanley Pennell, whose Rome Hanks Perkins considered the most exciting novel he had edited in recent years. There was no time to talk about new writers—Alan Paton and James Jones, for example, two authors whose promising manuscripts he was presently editing. Perkins, however, undoubtedly felt he had said more than enough. He picked up his hat and tugged it down over his head, put on his raincoat, turned his back on the standing ovation of his audience, and slipped out as unobtrusively as he had entered.
It was still raining hard. Under his black umbrella he trudged to Grand Central Station. He had never talked so much about himself so publicly in his life.
When he arrived at his home in New Canaan, Connecticut, late that night, Perkins found that the eldest of his five daughters had come over for the evening and was waiting up for him. She noticed that her father seemed me
lancholy, and she asked why.
“I gave a speech tonight and they called me ‘the dean of American editors,’ ” he explained. “When they call you the dean, that means you’re through.”
“Oh, Daddy, that doesn’t mean you’re through,” she objected. “It just means you’ve reached the top.”
“No,” Perkins said flatly. “It means you’re through.”
It was the twenty-sixth of March. On March 26, twenty-six years earlier, there had been a great beginning for Maxwell Perkins—the publication of a book that changed his life, and a great deal more.
II
Paradise
In 1919 the rites of spring in Manhattan were extraordinary demonstrations of patriotism. Week after week, battalions marched triumphantly up Fifth Avenue. The “war to end all wars” had been fought and won.
At Forty-eighth Street the parades passed before the offices of Charles Scribner’s Sons—Publishers and Booksellers. The Scribner Building was a ten-story structure of classical design, crowned with two obelisks and graced with stately pilasters. The ground floor was faced in shiny brass—the elegant storefront of the Scribner bookshop, a spacious, oblong room with a high vaulted ceiling and narrow metal staircases which spiraled to upper galleries. John Hall Wheelock, who managed the store before becoming a Scribner editor, called it “a Byzantine cathedral of books.”
Adjacent to the bookstore was an unobtrusive entrance. Behind it, a vestibule led to an elevator that clattered its way into the upper realms of the Scribner enterprise. The second and third floors housed financial and business departments. Advertising was on the fourth floor. And on the fifth were the editorial rooms—bare white ceilings and walls; uncarpeted concrete floors; rolltop desks and bookcases. In this austere style, Scribners, a family business in its second generation, maintained itself as the most genteel and tradition-encrusted of all the American publishing houses. There was still a Dickensian atmosphere about the place. The accounting office, for example, was run by a man in his seventies who spent his days perched on a high stool, poring over leather-bound ledgers. Typewriters had by then become standard equipment, and because women had to be hired to operate the contraptions, gentlemen were expected not to smoke in the offices.
From the fifth floor, the company was governed like a nineteenth-century monarchy. Charles Scribner II, “old CS,” was the undisputed ruler. His face usually wore a severe expression, and he had a sharp nose and white close-cropped hair and mustache. At age sixty-six, he had reigned forty years. Next in succession was his amiable brother Arthur, nine years younger, with softer features, who Wheelock said “was always a little paralyzed by his brother’s vitality.” William Crary Brownell, the editor-in-chief, white-bearded and walrus-mustached, had a brass spittoon and a leather couch in his office. Every afternoon he would read a newly submitted manuscript and then “sleep on it” for an hour. Afterward he would take a walk around the block, puffing a cigar, and by the time he had returned to his desk and spat, he was ready to announce his opinion of the book.
There were also younger men at Scribners. One of them, Maxwell Evarts Perkins, had arrived in 1910. He had spent four and a half years as advertising manager before ascending to the editorial floor to be apprenticed under the venerable Brownell. By 1919, Perkins had already established himself as a promising young editor. Yet as he observed the parades outside his office window, he felt twinges of disappointment about his career. In his thirties, he had considered himself too old and overburdened with responsibilities to enlist for action overseas. Watching the colorful homecoming, he felt sorry that he had not witnessed the war firsthand.
Scribners itself had scarcely experienced the war and its upheavals. The Scribner list was a backwater of literary tastes and values. Its books never transgressed the bounds of “decency.” Indeed, they seldom went beyond merely diverting the reader. There were none of the newer writers who were attracting attention—Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson. The three pillars of the House of Scribner were long-established writers steeped in the English tradition. The firm published John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga and the complete works of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Indeed, most of Scribners’ important books were by writers they had been publishing for years, whose manuscripts required no editing. William C. Brownell stated the company’s editorial policy in responding to one of Mrs. Wharton’s manuscripts: “I don’t believe much in tinkering, and I am not suffisant enough to think the publisher can contribute much by counselling modifications.”
For the most part, Maxwell Perkins’s duties as an editor were limited to proofreading galleys—long printed sheets, each containing the equivalent of three book pages—and to other perfunctory chores. Occasionally he was called upon to correct the grammar in a gardening book or arrange the selections in school anthologies of classic short stories and translations of Chekhov. The work demanded little creativity.
One regular Scribner author was Shane Leslie, an Irish journalist, poet, and lecturer who spent years at a time in America. On one of his extended tours he was introduced to a teen-aged boy by the headmaster of the Newman School in New Jersey. Leslie and the handsome youth—an aspiring writer from Minnesota—became friends. Eventually the young man entered Princeton University but enlisted in the army before graduating. He was commissioned and sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. “Every Saturday at one o‘clock when the week’s work was over,” he recalled years later, “I hurried up to the Officer’s Club and there in a corner of a room full of smoke, conversation and rattling newspapers, I wrote a one hundred and twenty thousand word novel on the consecutive weekends of three months.” In the spring of 1918 he believed the army was about to send him overseas. Unsure of his future, the young officer—F. Scott Fitzgerald—entrusted the manuscript to Leslie.
The work, entitled The Romantic Egotist, was little more than a grab bag of stories, poems, and sketches recounting the author’s coming of age. Leslie sent it to Charles Scribner, suggesting that he give a “judgment” upon it. By way of introduction he wrote,In spite of its disguises, it has given me a vivid picture of the American generation that is hastening to war. I marvel at its crudity and its cleverness. It is naive in places, shocking in others, painful to the conventional and not without a touch of ironic sublimity especially toward the end. About a third of the book could be omitted without losing the impression that it is written by an American Rupert Brooke.... It interests me as a boy’s book and I think gives expression to that real American youth that the sentimentalists are so anxious to drape behind the canvas of the YMCA tent.
The manuscript went from editor to editor during the next three months. Brownell “could not stomach it at all.” Edward L. Burlingame, another senior editor, found it “hard sledding.” The material was passed down until it reached Maxwell Perkins. “We have been reading ‘The Romantic Egoist’ 1 with a very unusual degree of interest,” Perkins wrote Fitzgerald that August; “in fact no ms. novel has come to us for a long time that seemed to display so much vitality.” But Perkins was extrapolating from a single response. Only he had liked the book, and his letter went on reluctantly to decline it. He cited governmental restrictions on printing supplies, high manufacturing costs, and “certain characteristics of the novel itself.”
Editors at Scribners considered criticism of works they turned down as beyond their function and likely to be resented by an author. But Perkins’s enthusiasm for Fitzgerald’s manuscript impelled him to comment further. Commandeering the editorial “we,” he risked offering some general remarks, because, he said, “we should welcome a chance to reconsider its publication.”
His main complaint with The Romantic Egotist was that it did not advance to a conclusion. The protagonist drifted, hardly changing over the course of the novel.
This may be intentional on your part for it is certainly not untrue to life [Perkins wrote]; but it leaves the reader distinctly disappointed and dissatisfied since he has expected him to arrive somewhere either in an
actual sense by his response to the war perhaps, or in a psychological one by “finding himself” as for instance Pendennis is brought to do. He does go to the war, but in almost the same spirit that he went to college and school—because it is simply the thing to do.
“It seems to us in short,” Perkins asserted, “that the story does not culminate in anything as it must to justify the reader’s interest as he follows it; and that it might be made to do so quite consistently with the characters and with its earlier stages.” Perkins did not want Fitzgerald to “conventionalize” the book so much as intensify it. “We hope we shall see it again,” he wrote in closing, “and we shall then reread it immediately.”
Perkins’s letter encouraged Lieutenant Fitzgerald to spend the next six weeks revising his novel. By mid-October he sent the reworked manuscript to Scribners. Perkins read it immediately, as promised, and was delighted to find it much improved. Rather than approaching old CS directly, he sought an ally in Scribner’s son. Charles III liked the book too, but his support was not enough. The older editors again voted Perkins down. With that, as Perkins later admitted to Fitzgerald, “I was afraid that ... you might be done with us conservatives.”
Max was nonetheless determined to see the book published. He brought it to the attention of two rival publishers. One Scribner colleague remembered Perkins was “terrified that they would accept it, for all the time he saw how vitally it might still be improved. The other publishers, however, sent it back without comment.”
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