Brownell was always considerate of the authors he turned down. Whenever a book of promise had to be rejected, it was Brownell who wrote the most sympathetic letters. Perkins admired these compassionate rejections as works of art. One was so warmhearted that the author mailed his manuscript back, having written in the margin of the letter: “Then why the devil don’t you publish it?”
Above all, Perkins believed, Brownell brought dignity to his work as editor-in-chief. Upon his death, Max volunteered to cut his vacation short and report back to work within the week. “Beyond that time,” he wrote Charles Scribner, disingenuously explaining away his need for the remainder of his vacation, “I couldn’t occupy myself; though I feel that Wheelock and Meyer are perfectly able to do anything, and that we have now as competent an editorial force as any publisher could hope for. And I believe our list will show the effect of it.”
Perkins was now forty-three and fully formed as a professional editor. His style was set. Max had told Louise early in his marriage that he wanted to be “a little dwarf on the shoulder of a great general advising him what to do and what not to do, without anyone’s noticing.” Max instructed his “generals” in a variety of ways. Sometimes he was bold. “You have to throw yourself away when you write,” he often told writers who came to him for help with their work. Sometimes, however, he was understated to the point of muteness. When an author would come to Perkins babbling tales of woe about his work or his life, Max typically sat in silence. A Scribners colleague remembered one luncheon when a writer laid all his problems out on the table; as he talked, Max ate slowly, not saying a word. Toward the end of the meal, which lasted several hours, the writer rose from the table, grabbed the editor’s hand with both of his, spluttered, “Thank you, Mr. Perkins, for all your help,” and bolted out the door.
Roger Burlingame recalled an occasion when a writer stood in Max’s office pouring out his unhappiness. Perkins went to the window as if overcome by the burden of his sympathy, and gazed down onto Fifth Avenue. After a few moments of surveying the street, rocking slightly, he appeared ready to speak, and the writer waited in anticipation for his editor’s comment on his plight. “You know,” said Perkins without turning, “I can’t understand why all these busy people move so slowly. The only ones who move fast are the boys on roller skates who have nothing to do. Why don’t we—why doesn’t everybody—wear skates?” The writer later gave Perkins credit for thoroughly distracting him from his problems.
As he approached middle age, Perkins’s tendency toward eccentricity began to flourish. He maintained an embarrassed belief in phrenology—the study of character as revealed by the protuberances of the skull. A prominent nasal bone was, he felt, the sign of individuality. He did not think any man who had a small nose or a flat back to his head could be especially worthwhile. To Perkins, it was a sign of mental weakness to confess a lapse of memory. “Never admit you can’t remember,” he would say. “Send a bucket into your subconscious.”
In his own engaging way he was becoming a fussbudget. Babies sucking on bottles disgusted him. Once, after a dinner honoring a famous beauty, he criticized her because “she had marks of her day clothes on her bare back.” He believed no “real lady” would ever drink beer or use Worcestershire sauce. “In our family,” he admonished his own daughters, “we say underclothes, not underwear.”
When he brought books home to put on his shelves, he immediately ripped off their dust jackets and threw them away. He instinctively closed volumes he found lying open, pages down, and he winced when he observed someone licking fingers to turn pages.
He was a doodler and would ceaselessly sketch portraits of Napoleon, always in profile. He also found pleasure in dreaming up “practical” solutions to everyday problems. Among his notions were that honey ought to be packaged in transparent containers and squeezed out like toothpaste. He went so far as to suggest to a friend in advertising that they should market the product as “Tubes of Liquid Sunshine.” He also thought typewriter paper ought to come in a long, perforated roll, like bathroom tissue.
Yet Perkins had no aptitude whatever for anything mechanical. “He couldn’t even drive in a screw,” said one daughter. One day several people on the fifth floor of the Scribner Building went running into Max’s office because they smelled smoke. They found Max totally ignoring a blaze in his wastebasket and carrying on with his work. One of old Charles Scribner’s grandsons, George Schieffelin, said, “I’m sure Max had no idea how it got started and even less how to put it out.”
Perkins’s daughters agreed their father was all but a menace behind the wheel of a car. Peggy said: “He would drive along at a breakneck speed until he began to think about something that interested him. Then he would slow up and creep along. It infuriated him to have people pass him. He always refused to dim his lights. He said it was silly. Once we came up behind a man and woman walking together by the side of the road. He slowed up and drove very slowly behind them, trying to make us see from an artist’s point of view the difference between the way a man and a woman walk. We begged him to go past, because of course the poor people were bewildered, but he wouldn’t. He was too interested in the problem of how to draw the difference.”
Perkins, the would-be inventor, believed the greatest inventor in the world could never compare with a great poet. The former “has made living easier, and more pleasurable so far as concerns that pleasure that comes from without,” he once wrote Louise. Hehas improved—if that is improvement—our surroundings. But the poet has actually changed ourselves. The great poet has added many cubits to our spiritual stature, and we see and hear and feel things more clearly, and deeply, and broadly forever, after he has had his chance at us; and even if he has not reached us directly, we are still changed by his influence upon other people through theirs on us; so that it comes about that a whole nation is made different by the poet, through all time, as the English nation was by Shakespeare. Indeed the whole world was; and by Homer and Dante as well.
“My earliest friend Maxwell Perkins, my lifelong friend,” wrote Van Wyck Brooks in his autobiography, “used to say that every man has a novel in him. The idea was not originally his,—it was, in fact, a commonplace, —but, being a man of character, he made it his; and I always felt that he might have written a first-rate novel himself if he had ranged over his own life. He was in his way a novelist born, but instead of developing this bent in himself, he devoted his intuitive powers to the development of others.”
It was that civil war again—Perkins versus Evarts, Cavalier versus Roundhead. “One side appreciated the writers,” Brooks observed, “the other side helped them, an ambivalence that explained why Max never became a writer himself and why he became the rock on which others leaned.”
VIII
A Little Honest Help
As autumn 1928 arrived, a vivacious Frenchwoman named Madeleine Boyd, wife of literary critic Ernest Boyd and the New York agent for many European authors, came with an armful of manuscripts to see Perkins. In the course of their meeting she spoke of an extraordinary novel of great length written by a huge North Carolinian named Thomas Wolfe. Then she went on to talk about other books. When Perkins brought her back to Wolfe’s O Lost, she seemed hesitant. “Why don’t you bring it in here, Madeleine?” he said, pressing further. She finally consented upon Perkins’s promise that he would read every word of it. They agreed that he could pick up the manuscript at five o‘clock that afternoon. “But,” Mrs. Boyd said with a smile, “you’ll have to send a truck for it.” At exactly five, one drove up before her apartment house. She turned the huge package over to the driver, who asked if that was one book. “Jeeesus Christ!” he said when told that it was.
“The first time I heard of Thomas Wolfe,” Max wrote two decades later in an unfinished article, “I had a sense of foreboding. I who loved the man say this. Every good thing that comes is accompanied by trouble.”
When O Lost reached Perkins, he had a lot of other work on his hands. This new manu
script of hundreds upon hundreds of pages was easy to ignore in favor of the dozens of smaller proposals and first drafts of books that crossed his desk every week. But accompanying the manuscript was a moving note for the publisher’s reader in which the author explained a few of the elements of his work. It said, in part: This book, in my estimate is from 250,000 to 380,000 words long. A book of this length from an unknown writer no doubt is rashly experimental, and shows his ignorance of the mechanics of publishing. That is true. This is my first book....
But I believe it would be unfair to assume that because this is a very long book it is too long a book.... The book may be lacking in plot but it is not lacking in plan. The plan is rigid and densely woven.... It does not seem to me that the book is overwritten. Whatever comes out of it must come out block by block and not sentence by sentence. Generally I do not believe the writing to be wordy, prolix, or redundant.
I have never called this book a novel. To me it is a book such as all men may have in them. It is a book made out of my life, and it represents my vision of life to my twentieth year.
I have written all this, not to propitiate you ... but to entreat you, if you spend the many hours necessary for a careful reading, to spend a little more time in giving me an opinion. If it is not publishable, could it be made so? ... I need a little honest help. If you are interested enough to finish the book, won’t you give it to me?
Max took up the pages and was at once enthralled by the opening, in which the hero’s father, W. O. Gant, as a young boy, watched a procession of ragged Confederate troops. Then followed 100 pages about W. O.’s life, long before the birth of his son Eugene, the actual protagonist of the story. “All this was what Wolfe had heard,” Max later recalled, “and had no actual association with which to reconcile it, and it was inferior to the first episode, and in fact to all the rest of the book.” He then was distracted by other work and gave the manuscript to Wallace Meyer, thinking, “Here is another promising novel that probably will come to nothing.”
Ten days later Meyer came in to show Perkins another extraordinary scene in that same huge manuscript, and that was enough to bring Max back to the book. He began to read it again. Soon he and Meyer were passing pages back and forth and John Hall Wheelock and the rest of the staff were grabbing whole sections at a time. When Max had finally lived up to his end of the bargain he had struck with Madeleine Boyd, he had not a shadow of a doubt about the value of the book. But he did recognize major stumbling blocks that could keep it from getting into print. He knew, for example, that so intense a work would be resented by a good many people at Scribners, for it was “very strong meat.” The book would also require considerable “reorganization” and a great deal of cutting. Max realized he should not even try to get Scribners committed to it before determining what the author was like and how difficult it would be to get him to revise. But he was determined to see the book published. Remembering his battles to publish Fitzgerald and Hemingway, he was sorry for a moment that he was not a publisher on his own.
In late October, Mrs. Boyd tracked Thomas Wolfe down and sent Perkins an address in Munich where she thought he could be reached. The editor wrote the author that he did not “know whether it would be possible to work out a plan by which [the manuscript] might be worked into a form publishable by us, but I do know that, setting the practical aspects of the matter aside, it is a very remarkable thing, and that no editor could read it without being excited by it and filled with admiration by many passages in it and sections of it.... What we should like to know is whether you will be in New York in a fairly near future, when we can see you and discuss the manuscript.”
When Wolfe received the letter, forwarded from Germany to Austria, he knew that editors from several houses had, in fact, already turned down the fictional autobiography. A few of them had nice things to say about it, but not one had expressed the vaguest interest in printing the book. “I can’t tell you how good your letter has made me feel,” Wolfe wrote Perkins on November 17, 1928, from Vienna. “Your words of praise have filled me with hope, and are worth more than their weight in diamonds to me.” He expected to be home in America shortly before Christmas, and not having looked at his book in months, he believed he could come back with a “much fresher and more critical feeling.” He admitted, “I have no right to expect others to do for me what I should do for myself, but although I am able to criticize wordiness and overabundance in others, I am not able practically to criticize it in myself.
“I want the direct criticism and advice of an older and more critical person,” Wolfe continued, not quite sure whether the signature on his letter from the editor read Perkins or Peters. “I wonder if at Scribners I can find someone who is interested enough to talk over the whole huge monster with me, part by part.” Wolfe was astonished he had managed to make even a connection with Charles Scribner’s Sons, which “I had always thought vaguely was a solid and somewhat conservative house.” He closed his letter with two hopes: first, that Perkins would be able to decipher the lightning flashes that were his script, “which is more than many people do”; and second, “that you will not forget me before I come back.”
Perkins had little trouble with the first wish, none with the second. Mrs. Boyd had recently told him of Wolfe’s being beaten almost to death at Munich’s Oktoberfest. That event, together with the facts Perkins had gleaned from Wolfe’s autobiographical work, gave him a glimpse of the pandemonium ahead. During the next few weeks, Max worried about the two “Moby Dicks” he would have to restrain—the man even more than the book.
Perkins returned to work from his New Year’s holiday on Wednesday, January 2, filled with trepidation at meeting the creator of the manuscript that covered his desk. Max had been forewarned of Wolfe’s unusual appearance, but he was nonetheless startled by the massiveness of the six-foot six-inch, black-haired man leaning against the jamb, filling his doorway. Years later Max recalled, “When I looked up and saw his wild hair and bright countenance, although he was so altogether different physically, I thought of Shelley. He was fair, but his hair was wild and his face was bright and his head disproportionately small.”
Wolfe lumbered into the office and sized up the editor, finding he was not as he had pictured him. The author later wrote Margaret Roberts, his most influential schoolteacher back home in Asheville, that the man who had summoned him was not at all “Perkinsy.”
[The] name sounds Midwestern, but he is a Harvard man, probably New England family, early forties, but looks younger, very elegant and gentle in dress and manner. He saw I was nervous and excited, spoke to me quietly, told me to take my coat off and sit down. He began by asking certain questions about the book and people.
Perkins talked first about a scene early in the manuscript between the hero’s father—the stonecutter W. O. Gant—and the madam of the local brothel, in which she was purchasing a tombstone for one of her girls. In his eagerness Wolfe blurted, “I know you can’t print that! I’ll take that out at once, Mr. Perkins.”
“Take it out?” Perkins exclaimed. “It’s one of the greatest short stories I have ever read!”
Max proceeded to discuss different parts of the book from a stack of notes he had made, suggestions for revisions and rearrangements of scenes. Wolfe reeled off whole paragraphs he was willing to excise immediately. At each one, it seemed, Perkins interrupted him to say, “No—you must let that stay word for word—that scene’s simply magnificent.” Wolfe’s eyes grew moist. “I was so moved and touched to think that someone at length had thought enough of my work to sweat over it in this way that I almost wept.”
Out of an instinctive tendency to postpone what was difficult, not out of cunning, as Wolfe might have suspected, Perkins left the hardest point for the last. O Lost lacked any real form, and the only way he could see to provide that structure was by selective cutting. Specifically, Perkins thought that despite the wonderful first chapter about the hero’s father as a boy, the book should begin with the father already grow
n in Altamont, the fictional name of Wolfe’s hometown, thus framing the story within the experience and the memory of the boy Eugene. Wolfe was not yet willing, during this first editorial session, to agree to so radical a cut as the first 100 pages. But he was not put off by the suggestion. In fact, he had never been so light of heart. “It was the first time, so far as I can remember,” Wolfe recorded later, “that anyone had concretely suggested to me that anything I had written was worth as much as fifteen cents.”
A few days later Perkins and Wolfe met again. Tom brought notes along indicating how he proposed to set to work in shaping his novel. He agreed to deliver 100 pages of corrected manuscript every week. When he asked if he could say something positive about publication to a dear friend, a theatrical designer named Aline Bernstein, who had given his manuscript to Madeleine Boyd in the first place, Max smiled and said that he thought so, that Scribners’ minds were practically made up. As Wolfe left Perkins’s office, he met John Hall Wheelock. The poet-editor took him by the hand and said, “I hope you have a good place to work in. You have a big job ahead.”
On January 8, 1929, Perkins wrote Wolfe that Charles Scribner’s Sons had formally accepted O Lost for publication. Drunk with glory, Tom came in to sign the contract and receive his advance on royalties. Some years later he described in The Story of a Novel that euphoric moment: “I left the publisher’s office that day and entered into the great swarm of men and women who passed constantly along Fifth Avenue at 48th Street, and presently I found myself at 110th Street, and from that day to this I have never known how I got there.” For days he walked on air with his contract tucked in his inner breast pocket, a check for $450 (10 percent having been deducted by his literary agent) pinned to it. “There is literally no reason why I should walk around New York with these documents,” he wrote Mrs. Roberts, “but in a busy crowd I will sometimes take them out, gaze tenderly at them, and kiss them passionately.”
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