Beginning with Fitzgerald, Perkins developed the habit of sending books to his laboring authors. “Max was like an old-time druggist,” remarked one of them, James Jones. “Whenever he saw you getting sluggish, he prescribed a book that he thought would pep you up. They were always specially selected for your condition, perfectly matched to your particular tastes and temperament, but with enough of a kick to get you thinking in a new direction.” In June, 1920, Max sent Fitzgerald a copy of The Ordeal of Mark Twain by Van Wyck Brooks. Brooks, Max wrote Scott, “is a brilliant chap and very attractive and if you do care for the book I would like to have you meet him at lunch some day.” Van Wyck Brooks was Max Perkins’s closest friend. They had known each other since kindergarten in Plainfield, New Jersey, and had been at Harvard together. Now, twelve years after graduation, Brooks was on his way to becoming the era’s foremost surveyor of American literature.
“It’s one of the most inspirational books I’ve read and has seemed to put the breath of life back in me,” Fitzgerald wrote back a few days after receiving the book. “Just finished the best story I’ve done yet & my novel is going to be my life masterpiece.” Fitzgerald’s heavily underlined copy of The Ordeal of Mark Twain is evidence of the deeper effect Brooks’s work had on his next group of stories. Scott read in Brooks about a Clemens novel called The Gilded Age, in which a man goes west in search of a mountain of coal and strikes it rich enough to marry the woman he loves. Scott then wrote a novella in which FitzNorman Culpepper Washington stumbled upon a mineral treasure, at about the same time, in Montana. Fitzgerald called his story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.”
The author worked on through the summer, but Perkins did not. He was never content on a vacation unless he felt he had earned it, and that summer, for the first time in his career as an editor, he believed he had. Before leaving for his respite, Perkins sent Fitzgerald his address, to be used should he need him for anything. It was simply the name of the small town he had gone to practically every summer of his life.
Windsor, Vermont rests a third of the way up the Vermont-New Hampshire border, on the western bank of the Connecticut River. It was for Max Perkins the most glorious place on earth. Some seventy years earlier, just beyond the shadow of Mount Ascutney, his maternal grandfather had built a compound of houses in which to assemble his family around him. “Windsor was the personal heaven of my grandfather’s grandchildren,” Max’s sister Fanny Cox wrote in Vermonter. “In the winter we lived in different settings ... but in the summer we gathered together in the big place behind the picket fence where six houses faced the village street and the grounds stretched back across green lawns with clipped hemlock hedges and round begonia-filled flower beds to slope down the hill to the pond.” Rising behind the pond was a particularly lovely part of the acreage, where streams raced down hills and footpaths wove through stands of pine and birch. The family called these special woods “Paradise.”
In Paradise a youth could run as wild and free as his imagination. Young Max Perkins had spent innumerable hours there with his brothers and sisters and cousins. Later, as a father, he took his own children. All the pleasures at the other end of the seven-hour ride from New York on the White Mountain Express, a wonderfully comfortable summer train, were passed on to them.
Perkins told one of his daughters, “The greatest feeling is to go to bed tired.” Bedtime had always been Perkins’s favorite time of day, those few minutes just before falling asleep when he could “steer his dreams.” In those final moments of wakefulness Maxwell Perkins recurringly transported himself back to Russia in 1812—the scene of his favorite book, War and Peace. Night after night his mind filled with visions of Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow in the frost and early winter snow. On mornings in Vermont after Tolstoi’s characters had paraded before him, he insisted that his dreams were more vivid and that he slept more soundly in Windsor than anywhere else.
Once every summer Max took his daughters for a hike up Mount Ascutney, marching them for thirty minutes and then resting for ten, just as Prince Andrei in War and Peace might have marched his soldiers. But Perkins’s greatest pleasure in Windsor was in losing himself on a long solitary stroll. A “real walk” he used to call it. Alone, he would stride across the same ground his ancestors had before him.
III
Provenance
No one could have known Max who did not understand what Windsor, or Vermont in general, meant for him, the deep stake in the old rural America from which the foreground of his life was in many of its elements so far removed,“ Van Wyck Brooks wrote in Scenes and Portraits. Practically all of Perkins’s life was spent in New York City or its suburbs, but the tart values of New England were the essence of his character. He was full of Yankee quirks and biases. He could be crotchety in his behavior and literary taste, obtuse and old-fashioned. And yet, Brooks believed, Windsor and all it stood for had kept him at heart ”so direct, so uninfluenced by prejudice, so unclouded by secondary feelings, so immediate, so fresh.“ Max’s was a New England mind, filled with dichotomies.
He was born on September 20, 1884, in Manhattan, at the corner of Second Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and named William Maxwell Evarts Perkins, thus becoming the nominative heir of two distinguished families. Brooks said he had known “few other Americans in whom so much history was palpably and visibly embodied, so that one saw it working in him, sometimes not too happily, for his mind was always in a state of civil war.”
It was the English battle between Roundheads and Cavaliers in 1642, Brooks said, that Max never quite fought through. That war had crossed the ocean and found its way to Perkins eight generations later. While the Perkins side of the family made him “the romantic, adventurous boy, indolent, graceful and frank, all gaiety, sweetness and animal charm,” the Evartses made him believe in doing things the hard way—“living against the grain.” Brooks said, “One or the other side ... of [the battle] constantly came to the front at crises in his life.”
John Evarts, a Welshman, was the first of Maxwell Perkins’s forebears to emigrate to the New World. As an indentured servant he sailed in 1635, settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and was made a freeman in 1638. A century and a half later he had only one direct descendant—Jeremiah Evarts. Born in 1782 and educated at Yale College, Evarts practiced law in New Haven. He was a stern, puritanical, religious man. A contemporary alleged that Evarts “had too much unbending integrity to be a popular lawyer.” He married Mehitabel Barnes, a widowed daughter of Roger Sherman, one of Connecticut’s signers of the Declaration of Independence. They settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where he assumed the editorship of the Panoplist, an organ of the orthodox Congregationalists. He began devoting his life entirely to pamphleteering and missionary enterprises, but did not restrict his proselytizing to religious concerns. For preaching abolition during one of his missions, he spent a year in a Georgia jail. In early March, 1818, traveling from Savannah, he was informed of the birth of a son—William Maxwell Evarts.
William entered Yale in 1833, where he was one of the founders of the Yale Literary Magazine. He graduated with honors, then attended law school at Harvard. Richard Henry Dana, who was writing up his maritime adventures in Two Years Before the Mast while matriculating at Harvard, later remembered: “The most successful speech made at the school during the whole time I was there, was made before a jury of undergraduates ... by Wm. M. Evarts.... If he does not become distinguished he will disappoint more persons than any other young man whom I have ever met with.” In 1843, Evarts married Helen Minerva Wardner in her hometown of Windsor. During the next twenty years, they produced seven sons and five daughters.
Evarts lived up to Dana’s expectations. His law career in New York City drew national attention in 1855 when he gave $1,000—one fourth of his entire fortune—to the Abolitionist cause. By 1889, when he made his last court appearance, he had taken part in a number of trials that tested basic principles of the Constitution. The Dictionary of American Biography dubbed h
im the “hero of the three great cases” of his generation—the Geneva arbitration case, the Tilden-Hayes election case of 1876, and the Andrew Johnson impeachment. In each trial he was victorious: He secured remuneration from foreign nations that fought against the Union during the Civil War, obtained the presidency for one man who did not win the popular vote of the nation, and defended another man’s right to continue serving as president.
When Evarts prepared his cases he invariably sought the counsel of learned friends. He often turned to Henry Adams, who wrote in his third-person autobiography: “In doubt, the quickest way to clear one’s mind is to discuss, and Evarts deliberately forced discussion. Day after day, driving, dining, walking he provoked Adams to dispute his positions. He needed an anvil, he said, to hammer his ideas on.” In 1877, President Hayes named Evarts Secretary of State. The New York legislature twice elected him to the United States Senate.
Upon his retirement from Washington, Evarts returned to Vermont, where he imperiously presided over family activities. His “White House” in Windsor was dark inside and full of Victorian clutter, including gold-framed portraits of Evarts ancestors and a white marble bust of himself wearing a toga.
The colorful Perkinses fill almost as many columns in the Dictionary of American Biography as the dour Evartses, but most of the Evartses failed to appreciate them. One Evarts cousin, ninety years after Max’s birth, still maintained, “The Perkinses had the wrong politics, sat on the wrong side of the church, and were all buried on the wrong side of the cemetery.”
Charles Callahan Perkins, Max’s paternal grandfather, inherited from his parents both the money and the temperament that naturally made him an influential friend of the arts in his native city of Boston. He was descended from Edmund Perkins, who emigrated to New England in 1650 and became a wealthy and philanthropic merchant—an East India magnate, who spawned several children who were Loyalists in the Revolution. Charles graduated from Harvard in 1843, having shown an interest in drawing and painting. He declined the customary opportunities to enter business and went abroad, determined to turn his enthusiasm for art into serious study. In Rome he mingled with several important artists of the day, but the limitations of his own talent kept him an amateur. He realized he could at least devote his life to the interpretation of art, and he became the first American art critic. In 1855 he married Frances D. Bruen of New York. Perkins kept close company with the Brownings in Europe and Longfellow in Boston. He wrote a half-dozen major studies of European sculpture.
By the time Charles Perkins’s three children came of age, most of his fortune had been exhausted. He resettled his family in New England and became friendly with Senator Evarts. Charles’s middle child, Edward Clifford—an alumnus of Harvard and Harvard Law School—met and fell in love with the senator’s daughter Elizabeth. In 1882, when they were each twenty-four, they married in Windsor.
Elizabeth was a dignified and gracious woman who, it was said, always walked at the same pace—not so slowly as to seem to have no purpose, but not so fast as to be unladylike—with her hands folded at her waist. She had often served as her father’s hostess in Washington. Her husband was dapper and possessed a freer spirit. They went to live in Plainfield, New Jersey, and Edward commuted to his law practice in New York, bicycling to and from the train station on a highwheeler, the first such vehicle in the town. Over thirteen years they had six children. She was a mother who never demanded good behavior but rather expected it; he was a gentle father.
The divergent traits of the two families came together in their second child, William Maxwell Evarts Perkins. Within him the two spirits—Perkins aestheticism and Evarts discipline—were blended. Even as a boy, Max had an artistic flair but New England common sense.
Every Sunday night, Edward Perkins read to his young family. “We all sat before our father and listened to Ivanhoe and The Rose and the Ring,” Max’s youngest sister, Fanny, remembered, “and we’d all laugh out loud, because the romance even then was so melodramatic.” For Max and his older brother, Edward, their father gave special readings of French books, which he translated as he went along to keep up his knowledge of the language. Spellbound, the two boys listened to the fabulous adventures of The Three Musketeers, General Marbot’s Memoirs, and Erckmann-Chatrian’s Conscript of 1813. Max grew infatuated with the military, especially the heroic accounts of Napoleon.
When he was sixteen, Max went to St. Paul’s Academy in Concord, New Hampshire, but was called home the following year to ease the pull on the family pursestrings. Then, in late October, 1902, Max’s father, who stubbornly disapproved of ever wearing topcoats, caught pneumonia. He died three days later at the age of forty-four. Edward C. Perkins had not saved any money, but his widow and six children were able to live comfortably on various family trust funds. Max completed his secondary education at the Leal School in Plainfield.
Edward, the eldest Perkins son, was away at Harvard, so Max took the chair at the head of the dinner table. Yankee instinct drove him to veil his grief and assume as many of his father’s roles as possible. He felt he must stand before his family as a monument of fortitude in adversity. He tended his younger siblings firmly but fondly, and they revered him. One morning after prayers, when his mother broke down in tears, he patted her on the shoulder until she stopped. A generation later, he told one of his own children, “Every good deed a man does is to please his father.”
As a teen-ager, Max passed through puppy love normally. “I kissed the dickens out of a pretty girl this afternoon,” he wrote Van Wyck Brooks in 1900. “It took about three hours of steady arguing to get it out of her, but finally she gave me permission.” Several summers he tutored children in Southampton, Long Island, and at age sixteen he worked as a counselor at Camp Chesterfield in New Hampshire. Out in the woods one day with several young hikers, Max heard terrible cries. He sent the boys back to camp and set off to find where the screams were coming from. He came to a barn and saw a woman standing in the doorway, struggling with two men who were holding her arms. One of the men said: “What do you want?” Max replied, “I’ve come to rescue the lady.” Years later Max would shake with laughter as he told that story, for it turned out that the woman had delirium tremens and the men were simply trying to get her indoors.
The following summer one small event occurred which was to affect Max for the rest of his life. He went swimming one afternoon with a younger boy named Tom McClary in a deep pond in Windsor. Tom was a poor swimmer, and halfway across the pond he lost his nerve and clamped his arms around Max’s neck. They both sank. Max fought free and swam toward shore. Then he thought of Tom. He looked over his shoulder and saw the boy floating face down. Max swam back, grabbed Tom’s wrist and towed him ashore. To pull him up the bank he clasped his hands under Tom’s stomach, which had the happy effect of making water gush out of Tom’s mouth, and in a moment he was breathing again. The boys agreed to say nothing of the accident, but it was not forgotten.
In that moment of Tom McClary’s near drowning, he confided but once, years later, to a friend, he saw that he was “by nature careless, irresponsible and timid.” He admitted: “When I was seventeen I realized this by one little incident not worth recounting when I was ineffectual, and I then made the only resolution that I ever kept. And it was, never to refuse a responsibility.” The oath was so solemn that selflessness and duty soon dominated Perkins’s judgment.
As generations of Perkinses had before him, Max went to Harvard. There he dropped his unused first name, his way of shucking his ancestors. When a senior in the class of 1907 he wrote,To my mind, college is the place to expand, to overcome prejudices, to look at things through one’s own eyes. Here the boy first stands upon his own feet. Hitherto he has been in the hands of others to mould, now he must mould himself. He must cut loose from old ideas.
When he arrived at Harvard only the social side really appealed to Max. “I admired the ‘sport,’ the social butterfly,” he wrote in his college essay “Varied Outlooks.” �
��I too wished to dress well, to have many friends, to smoke and drink in cafes, to occupy a front row seat at light operas.” He had thick blond hair and from some angles a delicate beauty; from others he appeared striking rather than handsome. In yearbook photographs the literary critic Malcolm Cowley saw a close resemblance to Napoleon, one of Perkins’s childhood heroes, when the Corsican had been a young lieutenant of artillery—the “same wide, sensitive mouth, the same Roman nose under a high forehead, and the same big ears close to the skull.”
In November of his freshman year Perkins was arrested after the Yale game for being in the company of a drunk and disorderly classmate and locked up in jail. In December his grades entitled him to become the first member of his class to be placed on probation. It was a distinction “the sport” always remembered with pride.
Perkins carried a chip on his shoulder in Cambridge. Unlike the wealthy “Gold Coast” men, he was at Harvard on limited funds. Max worked in the summers and felt shabby. He was proud of the Evartses and Perkinses, and he was fond of saying that “some of them were very wealthy and some of them were very poor, but it is impossible to tell which were which.” In college, he felt as though his family’s dignity had been worn to its barest threads. That hardly affected the way others regarded him, but Max developed the New Englander’s horror of accepting anything he did not work for. “When a man does you a favor, he owns a little piece of you,” he once explained to his third daughter, who recalled further: “One of his best friends, who lived on Long Island, in a luxurious house, used to beg him to come on weekends. My father longed to go, but wouldn’t because he couldn’t afford to tip the butler.”
Instead, almost weekly, Perkins, in frayed shirt cuffs, walked to the home of one of his uncles, the Reverend Prescott Evarts, rector of Christ’s Church in Cambridge. “Max always seemed to enjoy the family gettogethers,” the clergyman’s son Richard remembered. “We played checkers, ate dinner, and often got into loud arguments, usually social questions, about the importance of heredity versus environment. But we all knew Sunday night with us was his way to save money.”
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