“Men measure social success by what clubs they belong to,” Perkins wrote as an upperclassman. When his Uncle Prescott, a Harvard alumnus, learned that Max had been invited to join Fox Club but couldn’t afford it, he wrote a check to cover the expenses. Max was reluctant to accept it but joined because, he observed, at Harvard the “importance of clubs simply could not be denied.”
Perkins was also on the staff of the Harvard Advocate, the campus literary magazine, and rose to its board of editors. For the most part his contributions satirized the gentlemanly practices and pursuits of Harvard students. In one essay, “On Girls and Gallantry,” he wrote: “Authorities affirm that man’s reverence for woman is the scale by which civilization is measured.... Of this much at least I am sure: not only are no two girls alike but no single girl is the same, save by the purest coincidence, at two different times.”
Three of Max’s Harvard friends were also making regular contributions to the Advocate: the poet John Hall Wheelock; Edward Sheldon, whose play Salvation Nell was a Broadway hit while he was still an undergraduate; and Van Wyck Brooks.
Brooks said he followed Perkins to Harvard from Plainfield because “I was a writer born,—I seemed always to have known this—and I supposed that Harvard was the college for writers.” Max had been there for a year before Van Wyck arrived, and he gave his hometown friend every chance to meet the right people. The two of them spent most of their time at the Stylus, the literary club Perkins enjoyed most in Cambridge. They lived together in its straw-yellow wooden house at 41 Winthrop Street. Brooks observed that a Puritanical “Cromwell” spirit in Max was uppermost then. For a while Max awakened Van Wyck regularly at six A.M. and read Herbert Spencer and other philosophers aloud to him. He occasionally wore a jaunty Norfolk jacket—as did Professor William James —but usually dressed in funereal grays and black.
Max chose to study economics. He did so, Brooks believed, because Max “did not like to know about railway rates and fire-insurance statistics.” The choice was an extension of one of his grandfather Evarts’s aphorisms: “I pride myself on my success in doing not the things I like to do, but the things I don’t like to do.” That kind of Yankee thinking, which found virtue in hardship, enabled Max to move upstairs at the Stylus, into a tiny attic with a table and a cot, and often to study through the night. Years later Perkins realized, “I threw away my education though by majoring in political economy which I hated, on some theory that for that very reason it was good discipline and that whatever courses in literature which I would have loved could give me, I would get in the natural course of things.” Max never read all he would have liked. Throughout his career, for example, he was embarrassed about his shallow knowledge of Shakespeare’s works.
Outside the Stylus Club, Max found most of his literary inspiration in “Copey‘s” circle. Whether or not they had been among his students, most men who were at Harvard during his forty years of residence in the Yard remembered Professor Charles Townsend Copeland. Copey was the little man from Calais, Maine, with wire-rim spectacles and a bulbous head—topped in the cooler months by a derby and in the summer by a straw boater. By the time he had become a member of the English Department at Harvard he had turned his back on an acting career, dropped out of Harvard Law School, and worked seven years on the staff of the Boston Post. He was neither an intellectual nor a scholar, but he had the ability to teach with almost mystical enthusiasm. Scanning sonnets meant less to Copey than performing them; a curmudgeonly iconoclast who turned ham before an audience of any size, he took Harvard by storm. Students flocked to his recitations of the English masterpieces and joined his indulgent literary discussions. But Copey’s reputation was deserved: He could breathe life into the dustiest classics.
Copeland was Perkins’s instructor when he took freshman English, and the young professor’s approach to literature roused Max. When Copey took over the expository writing course, English 12, Perkins immediately petitioned to be among the thirty persons admitted. “Copey was not a professor teaching a crowd in a classroom,” Walter Lippmann remembered in a tribute to Copeland. “He was a very distinct person in a unique relationship with each individual who interested him.”
The method of his teaching, as it lives in my own memory [Lippmann elaborated], seems to me to have been more like a catch-as-catch-can wrestling match than like ordinary instruction. What happened was that you were summoned to his chambers in Hollis and told to bring with you your manuscript. You were told how to read what you had written. Soon you began to feel that out of the darkness all around you long fingers were searching through the layers of fat and fluff to find your bones and muscles underneath. You could fight back but eventually he stripped you to your essential self. Then he cuffed the battered remains and challenged them into their own authentic activity.
Almost from the moment he and Professor Copeland became friends, Max applied himself to his studies. Copey’s influence on Perkins grew steadily. Certainly he developed Max’s editorial instincts. By his fourth year at Harvard, Max was earning honors grades. More important, he acquired Copeland’s love for writing. “So far as I am concerned,” Max wrote Copey years later, “you did more good than all the rest of Harvard put together.”
During Max’s senior year, a Miss Mary Church, who ran a girls’ finishing school on Beacon Street in Boston, asked Copeland to recommend a student to instruct her senior pupils in English composition. Copey picked Perkins. One of the dozen schoolgirls, Marjorie Morton Prince, clearly remembered this young man of twenty-two, just a few years older than his audience. “Every time he arrived we sat there hypnotized. We must have seemed absolutely dumb to him. He talked about writing as though it were the most important subject in the world. And we all worked like slaves for him. After a few weeks, Max started to wear dark glasses in class. We knew it was to keep from looking at us and getting embarrassed, because we all stared at him with a kind of dreamy glaze over our eyes.”
Max graduated from Harvard in June of 1907 with an Honorable Mention for his work in Economics. The only one of his circle of friends who did not celebrate his commencement with a grand tour of Europe, he went right to work. He did not even consider preparing for the bar (though his three brothers became lawyers). Instead, he took a job at the Civic Service House in the Boston slums. It called for teaching Russian and Polish immigrants at night and district visiting by day, but it allowed Max free time for reading and learning to type. At summer’s end he took a short vacation in Windsor, then went to New York to work on a newspaper. Van Wyck Brooks said, “Copey, no doubt, the old newspaperman, had worked on Max’s imagination.”
Getting a good newspaper job in those days usually depended on one’s connections. Perkins knew the son of the managing editor of the New York Times, but that proved to be almost as much of a liability as an asset. The Times hired Max, but it was the city editor—not the managing editor—who handed out assignments. This particular city editor liked to choose his own reporters. Max was put on “emergency work”—he was one of the reporters who hung around the office from six P.M. to three A.M. waiting for suicides, fires, and other nocturnal catastrophes. For three months Perkins sat through the night, staring at the city editor and wondering, “Does this man know the paper is paying me $15 a week?”
Then Max was moved up to police reporting, covering everything from murders in Chinatown to rent strikes on the Lower East Side. In due course he was promoted to the Times’s general staff. He scooped the city with his story on the collision of the S.S. Republic off Nantucket Light and covered William Jennings Bryan’s final campaign speech at Madison Square Garden.
Max volunteered for any risky assignment. Covering one story, he got strapped in the electric chair at Sing Sing; another time he accompanied champion race-car driver George Robertson in a record-breaking, sixty-miles-per-hour test ride in a Locomobile car No. 16. But few of Perkins’s articles got closer to the front page than the society news.
He enjoyed his independence and forev
er thereafter joked about his “roughing it” in his cold-water flat, saying, “I had to go to the Harvard Club for hot baths.” A few years later, Perkins spoke to one of Copey’s classes and said that a time comes when a man “assimilates the mental habits of a newspaperman and this will hurt him. It is obvious that the rapidity and carelessness with which the newspaperman must write will be fatal to any higher form of writing in the end; but I am thinking rather of the interest the reporter takes in events as such, quite apart from any true significance. He is a recorder and nothing more. He does not look below the surface of things.” Max was still interested in what he called “one of those professions whose practitioners deal in the most powerful of all commodities—words.” But he was tiring of the journalist’s erratic hours and constant deadlines.
During his years at the Times he had been calling on Louise Saunders, a girl with whom he had attended dancing class in Plainfield years earlier. Louise came from a prominent Plainfield family. Her mother, she once wrote, “was very beautiful—much more beautiful than were the other mothers in the little suburban town in which we lived.” Louise’s father, William Lawrence Saunders, pursued politics, engineering, and business. A friend of Woodrow Wilson, he was twice elected mayor of Plainfield. After patenting more than a dozen major inventions based on his experiments with compressed air, he became the first president of the Ingersoll-Rand corporation. He constantly entreated his two children to “learn the value of money” and he wanted everything to be “practical.”
Every Easter Sunday the Saunders family kept their team of horses stabled and walked to church. Louise adored the ritual, particularly one Easter in the 1890s when her hat was especially pretty; it was made of dark-green straw with a wreath of leaves and tiny red button roses. That Easter, for the first time, she became aware of the church itself; she noticed the blue ceiling sprinkled with bright silver stars. Under heaven’s blue dome she rested her hand on the pew in front of her and thought about her Easter hat. Three rows in front of the Saunderses sat the Perkins family. Louise’s eyes were drawn to Max, as she later confessed, “because he looked up at the blue ceiling and the stars. He seemed to wonder what could be understood.”
A few years later, when the Saunders daughters were in their early teens, their mother died of cancer. Mr. Saunders adored his girls but his overriding passion was for travel. His children sometimes accompanied him for months of living abroad, but more and more often he embarked alone on long voyages. Left at home, the girls were raised by a governess who persistently remarked to Louise, “Isn’t it a pity you’re not pretty like your sister.”
For a time Louise withdrew into herself. Years later, when Max Perkins began paying serious attention to her, she had grown out of her shell and had developed the talent and passion to become an actress. And by then Louise was beautiful. She was petite, with a fine, slim figure. She had long almond-shaped eyes, light-brown hair, a winning smile, and a small straight nose. Her father had converted a stable into a kind of theater for her. She became well known in Plainfield for her amateur performances as well as for several plays she had written.
Max found Louise Saunders delightfully feminine. She had intelligence, humor, and a volatile personality that contrasted with his steady one. Full of vitality, she could be temperamental and vain and unpredictable with her clever remarks. She depended on her intuition, what one daughter called her “uncanny knack for arriving at solutions for things without reasoning.”
Max first thought seriously about Louise in the summer of 1909, after she had invited him to a swimming party and picnic at her family’s place in Sea Girt, New Jersey. When he returned to New York he wrote her that he had left behind a pair of pajamas. Louise could not find them but came across somebody else’s bathing suit. “Here are your pajamas,” she explained. “I’m afraid they have suffered a sea change into something rich and strange.”
Max began inviting Louise to Windsor for weekends. On one occasion his younger sister Fanny spied on the two of them sitting in the parlor. They were holding a pincushion between them, trying to push out the needles stuck inside. “I don’t think they looked down at their hands once,” Fanny remembered. “They just gazed into each other’s eyes and seemed very much in love.”
Max Perkins was full of notions about women, pro and con. One of his favorite saws was that a man who didn’t marry was a coward, as was a woman who did. After a certain age, he believed, bachelors were just shirking responsibilities and women started looking for husbands only to avoid gossip or pity. But the warring factions in Max’s personality seemed balanced by Louise. In her he found every quality he deemed desirable in a wife. His romantic side responded to her beauty and her need to be protected; his cerebral side foresaw and welcomed a lifelong battle of wits. On her part, Louise spoke of Max as “my Greek God.”
By the winter of 1909, Max was looking for a job with regular hours. He heard about an opening in the advertising department at Charles Scribner’s Sons and got an appointment with the head of the company. Max had learned that one of his professors from Harvard was an old friend of Charles Scribner and so, before the interview, he solicited a letter from him. Barrett Wendell obliged.
Dear Charles:
May I have the pleasure of giving Maxwell Parkins this personal word of introduction to you. Old fellows like me don’t know young ones so well as we should like to. But I knew Perkins’s father well; and you as well, if I am not mistaken, knew his mother yes. ago—a daughter of Mr. Evarts. And I have known and admired all four of his grandparents. So when he came to college, he had a rather hard record to hold in my etteem; and he held it, happily and pleasantly. He has in him the right stuff. He is really the sort one can depend on.
“Of course, those who could most competently recommend me are my superiors on the Times,” Perkins wrote Mr. Scribner, after they had discussed the post of advertising manager, and without their recommendation I could hardly hope for the position of which you spoke to me. Yet I cannot afford to set my bridge afire while I am crossing it. So far, I have said nothing here of my intention to leave the newspaper business. But if things so work out that the want of recommendation from my editors alone stands in my way with regard to this position, I shall ask instantly for it.
Max continued working at the Times, waiting for Scribner to make his decision. One night in the early spring of 1910, he was sent to the Bowery to cover a story. An enterprising burglar had rented a vacant store across the street from the Bowery Savings Bank and had dug a tunnel most of the way to the bank’s vault when his passageway collapsed. The thief was trapped underground. Perkins’s assignment was to report to his office every half-hour on the progress of the rescue mission. The nearest telephone to the scene was a private line in a saloon across the street. As policemen worked deep into the night, Perkins felt embarrassed about making repeated calls on the house, so he ordered a drink with each call. It was almost dawn when the robber was brought to the surface and arrested. Max went home to collapse from intoxication as much as exhaustion. Just a few hours later his roommate, Barry Benefield, awakened him with the message that Mr. Scribner wanted to see him that morning at nine.
Max was tired and hung over throughout the interview, but Scribner was nonetheless impressed by the young man’s earnestness. Perkins had explained his motives to him previously in a letter:I know that people generally, and with considerable reason, suspect a newspaperman of wanting the quality of steadiness. They do not think him capable of settling down to a regular and unexciting life. In case you share in that idea, I want to tell you that aside from my natural interest in books and all connected with them, I am anxious to make this change because of my desire for a regular life; and I have the strongest reasons a young man can have for desiring such a life, and for liking it once I have it.
Perkins was hired as advertising manager and promptly got engaged.
At noon on December 31, 1910, he and Louise Saunders were married in Plainfield’s Holy Cross Episcopal Churc
h, under the silver stars. William Saunders gave his new son-in-law a gold watch as a wedding present, which Max carried from that day on. As a minor hearing deficiency worsened each year, it became Perkins’s habit to put the watch up to his weak left ear, then slowly move it away to measure his auditory powers by the distance at which he could still discern the ticking.
Max and Louise honeymooned in Cornish, New Hampshire—just across the river from Windsor—in a small cottage belonging to one of the Evarts cousins. Louise’s father had told his daughters that when each started out in marriage he would present her with a home. The Perkinses accepted his offer—though Max felt uneasy about it—and when they returned to New Jersey they crossed the threshold of a small, plain house at 95 Mercer Avenue in North Plainfield. Shortly after settling in, they took back all the duplicate silver trays and bread baskets they received as wedding presents and bought a thirty-inch marble statue of the Venus de Milo. It became a favorite possession.
Perkins was happy with his new job and its more normal hours. The position of advertising manager at Scribners required imagination (though not daring), an instinctive appreciation for the literary product, and a feel for what the public would buy. Forgetting his college training in economics, Max sometimes spent well over his budget on books he liked. In 1914 one of the editors of the Scribner staff left to become a partner in another firm. Charles Scribner had been so impressed with Perkirls’s work that he moved him up to the fifth floor. Max’s brother Edward recalled, “He used to say they made an editor out of him to keep the company from going bankrupt.”
Max Perkins Page 5