“But now,” he wrote his former schoolteacher on January 12, 1929, “is the time for sanity. My debauch of happiness is over. I have made promises.” He had a part-time teaching job at New York University, but revising his book took precedence over correcting his students’ themes. Already he thought of quitting his job for a professional writing career. Feeling nothing less than devotion for Scribners, he wrote Perkins, “I hope this marks the beginning of a long association that they will not have cause to regret.” Wolfe retired to his second-floor, rear apartment on West Fifteenth Street to face some of the problems that he and Perkins had underscored.
O Lost was a portrait of a writer in his youth, living within the mountains that encircled Asheville, North Carolina. Even before it had been edited, publishing gossip had bloated the book’s length into titanic proportions. People who had seen the manuscript swore it stood several feet off the ground. In fact, it was 1,114 pages of onionskin, contained some 330,000 words, and stood five inches high. Wolfe himself realized a book that size was probably unreadable and certainly unwieldy. And so in one of his writing journals, he drafted a proposal for condensation: “First to cut out of every page every word that is not essential to the meaning of the writing. If I can find even 10 words in every page this wd. = 10,000 or more in entire mss.” By the middle of January he had begun.
“When they accepted my book,” Wolfe wrote his friend George W. McCoy of the Asheville Citizen, “the publishers told me to get busy with my little hatchet and carve off some 100,000 words.” Perkins gave Wolfe some general suggestions for keeping his hero in sharp focus and let him go off alone to cut. The author put in long hours and returned a few weeks later, pleased with his new version of O Lost. Perkins was enthusiastic as ever about the poetic quality of the writing, but was not satisfied: For all Wolfe’s work, the book was only eight pages shorter. He had made many of the deletions Perkins had suggested, but the new transitions he wrote to connect the severed portions of the narrative had swollen into thousands of words.
Wolfe told Madeleine Boyd that cutting his manuscript was a “stiff perplexing job.” Practically speaking, he knew it was desirable to reduce the length of his typescript, but for hours at a time he stared at the pile of pages. “Sometimes,” he wrote her, “I want to rip in blindly and slash, but unless I know where the result would be disastrous.” Mrs. Boyd instructed Wolfe to listen to Max Perkins carefully, because, she said, “he is one of those quiet and powerful persons in the background, the sole and only excuse ... for Scott Fitzgerald having been successful as he is.” Once, sometimes twice a week, without appointment, Wolfe went to Scribners, carrying 100-page sections. If he did not appear, Perkins wrote Wolfe or simply called him up to find out why.
By spring Tom and Perkins were working every day on the revision of the book. “We are cutting out big chunks,” Tom wrote his sister, Mabel Wolfe Wheaton, “and my heart bleeds to see it go, but it’s die dog or eat the hatchet. Although we both hate to take so much out, we will have a shorter book and one easier to read when we finish. So, although we are losing some good stuff, we are gaining unity. This man Perkins is a fine fellow and perhaps the best publishing editor in America. I have great confidence in him and I usually yield to his judgment.”
In time, rumors about the editing of O Lost were exaggerated as much as those about the size of the original manuscript; Perkins’s evaluation of his efforts on it diminished proportionately. Ultimately he characterized his work as “a matter of reorganization.” Whole chunks of the narrative were, in fact, lifted and replaced elsewhere in the book. In truth, however, the most dramatic labor done on the novel was in cutting. Ninety thousand words—enough to fill a large book—were eliminated.
As a rule every deletion was suggested by Perkins, discussed and fought over by him and Wolfe, then removed. No part of the manuscript was extracted without mutual consent; no pages were destroyed. Wolfe saved every remnant ever associated with his writing, and Perkins suggested that much of the excised material in storage might be used in some future pieces.
To create cohesion among the stories and lives which crisscrossed within O Lost’s hundreds of pages, Max recommended that the whole saga be “unfolded through the memories and senses of the boy, Eugene.” The first and largest cut, then, was the typescript’s introductory 1,377 lines. Tom finally agreed with Perkins’s criticism that when he had tried to go back into the life of his father before he arrived in Asheville, events not drawn directly from Wolfe’s own experience, “the reality and the poignance were diminished.” So Gant’s history before he arrived in Altamont was reduced to three pages and his remembrance of the Civil War to twenty-three words: “How this boy stood by the roadside near his mother’s farm, and saw the dusty Rebels march past on their way to Gettysburg.” For years it weighed on Max’s conscience that he had persuaded Tom to cut out that first scene of the two little boys on the roadside with the battle impending, but without it, the reader was drawn right into the story.
Getting through to the end of the story, however, was more difficult. After a point Perkins had to search not for whole pages to be excised but often merely single phrases. His criterion throughout was his conviction that the interaction between Eugene and his family was the book’s absolute center and that any sequences leading the reader away from this central theme had to be removed. A satirical episode about the wealthy landowners building their estates outside Asheville, for example, was deleted, as was a parody of T. S. Eliot’s poetry, because the tone clashed with the pattern of the rest of the material. Cuts made because of obscenities or improprieties amounted to 524 lines.
On twenty different occasions Wolfe spoke to the reader in direct address. If the book was meant to demonstrate a growing awareness as Eugene matured into manhood, Max thought there was no place for the writer years later to make contemporary comments on the scene. They were removed.
Deletions were as difficult for Perkins to suggest as they were for Wolfe to execute. Still, he pointed out several characters he felt did not warrant as much attention as Wolfe had given them. “I remember the horror with which I realized ... that all these people were almost completely real, that the book was literally autobiographical,” Max said almost twenty years later to another of his authors, James Jones. “But Mr. Perkins, you don’t understand,” Tom would appeal every time Max sentenced a character to the chopping block. “I think these people are ‘great’ people and that they should be told about.” Max agreed with Wolfe but he would have felt negligent not to argue for these deletions because he was convinced that, instead of propelling the story, the large crew of characters slowed it down. Four pages about Wolfe’s mother’s brother—to name but one of many examples—were reduced to: “Henry, the oldest, was now thirty.”
Perkins and Wolfe made real progress with O Lost that April. They continued to meet whenever a section was done, and they believed the manuscript would soon be short enough for one volume. Max proposed new revisions, and Wolfe retreated to his apartment either to make further repairs or to begin new parts. With the last of Perkins’s suggestions came a confession: his disapproval of the title. Neither he nor any of his colleagues especially liked O Lost. Tom came up with many others and finally brought in a list. Max and John Hall Wheelock were each drawn to a three-word phrase from Milton’s Lycidas, the one title Wolfe had also secretly thought the best—Look Homeward, Angel.
By the summer of 1929 Madeleine Boyd believed, as she would for years to come, that “without that other genius—Max—the world would never have heard of Tom Wolfe.” At the end of July, upon reading the revised and edited novel, she wired Max Perkins: WOLFE’S BOOK SO GOOD THANKS TO YOU. Indeed, after witnessing the bold new kind of editorial work Perkins was undertaking with Wolfe, Mrs. Boyd worked up the courage to ask Max a question that had long intrigued her. “Why don’t you write yourself?” she inquired in a letter. “I have a feeling you could write so much better than most of the people who do write.” Perkins delivered his r
esponse when they met next. She recalled, “Max just stared at me for a long time and said, ‘Because I’m an editor.’ ”
Once he left college, Perkins had spent his entire life working with words. While his first professional inclination toward journalism indicated an interest in becoming a writer, he never showed signs of the frustrated novelist in his publishing career. He vented any repressed desires to write by volunteering his ideas to authors who had the time and temperament to devote to a single project. And he expressed himself in his letters. During his editorial career Max dictated tens of thousands of them, often two dozen a day, “all as if the person he was writing to was in the room,” remarked his secretary, Irma Wyckoff. “Mr. Perkins even dictated his own punctuation”—which included a propensity for semi-colons and for following commas and periods with dashes—“which made his letters especially conversational. So many of his authors said that he coud talk about literature better than any writer. That was especially true in his letters.”
Van Wyck Brooks analyzed Perkins’s letters from a more scholarly point of view and observed that “Max’s epistolary style was distinctly eighteenth century—the result of a taste I shared with him for the world of Swift, Addison, Defoe and Pope that especially included the circle of Dr. Johnson.” One point in a Perkins letter that especially impressed Brooks for its illustration of his friend’s “writer’s sensibility” was what Max remembered of the life of Swift. It was, said Brooks,not the romance of Vanessa, which everyone talked of, but something a novelist would have observed, that Swift liked to sit in taverns on greens listening to the talk of teamsters and coachmen. Just so Stephen Crane had sat by the hour in Bowery saloons, fascinated by the rhythm and tempo of living speech, and this went far to explain to me Max’s intuitive understanding of the writers of his own time in his own country.
Less than a handful could understand the writer’s point of view, Perkins said, while “the true artist has always insisted upon making his book what he wanted it” and should never be censored by editors or any outsider. This understanding enabled him to outline whole novels more than once that subsequently his authors executed or to suggest that in writing their books they should follow certain forms that proved to be entirely responsible for their ultimate success. Meanwhile he affirmed that “the only important things” were “loyalty, fortitude and honour” and he felt that to be “born knowing this” meant going at least a part of the way towards being “a great writer in more than the technical sense.”
Though he never became a “creative” writer, Perkins came as close as he could by being a truly creative editor.
To Brooks, one of the most interesting things about Max was that “perpetual war with himself that made him in the end a ‘prey to sadness.’ ” It was the “despairing refusal to be oneself” which really means that a man “does not give the consent of his will to his own being.”
Max and Tom Wolfe spent five or six evenings together that summer. The city fascinated Wolfe, and when he was not working, he enjoyed nothing more than walking through every part of town with his editor. When they were together, Wolfe seemed to inhale an entire city block’s sights, sounds, and smells. And it was on these occasions that Perkins noticed that Thomas Wolfe, like Swift or Stephen Crane, was a keen observer. “He frequented saloons, and drank there, and knew a hundred bartenders as friends,” Max said; “but it was not because of the drink. He loved the live, expressive talk of natural people at a bar when their tongues are loosened a little or much and they speak in the language of life.”
During his walks with Max, Tom usually talked about what he would write next. He knew unconsciously what he had to say but he was often confused about how to express it. When Wolfe became silent and the burden of conversation fell on Perkins, he used to make up ideas for books, just stories that did not amount to anything, sometimes maundering until something caught Tom’s attention. Years later, Max told William B. Wisdom, a great admirer of Wolfe’s work, of one particular walk when I said to Tom that I had always thought a grand story could be written about a boy who had never seen his father, his father having left when he was a baby, or even before that, as a soldier of fortune say,—and of how this boy set out to find his father and went through a series of adventures—a picaresque kind of novel—and finally did find him in some odd situation. I just said this idly for of course such a story as I was thinking of could only be written by one of those fairy tale writers that we all publish.
But Tom ruminated on this as if it were a serious matter, then said, “I think I could use that, Max.” Perkins was puzzled, because his idea was merely a superficial story of adventure, far below Tom’s talents. He was even a little worried that Wolfe should consider it, until he realized the underlying truth of the idea for Wolfe, that Tom himself was “taking the search for a father in a profound sense, and that is what he was bound to write.” The death of Wolfe’s father in 1922, when Tom was earning his Master of Arts degree at Harvard, so traumatized the author that it took hundreds of pages in graphic detail before he wrote it out of his system. It was at the core of his writing for the next four years.
While Wolfe revised his proofs of Look Homeward, Angel, there were still passages that needed surgery. But he found himself constantly adding to the book, for each cut from the original body of material now appeared to him as a gaping wound that needed suturing. He was not deliberately countering his editor’s advice. “I am simply not able intelligently to select between what I have left,” he explained to John Hall Wheelock. “At times getting this book in shape seems to me like putting corsets on an elephant,” he wrote his editors in apology for causing so much trouble. “The next one will be no bigger than a camel at the most.” It was not until August 29, 1929, that everyone finished reading the final proofs.
Once the work was completed, another problem in Wolfe’s life started erupting. It was the summer of 1929 when Tom first discussed with Perkins his relationship with a married woman, the celebrated scenic designer for the Neighborhood Playhouse, Aline Bernstein. (Wolfe did not mention her by name.) During the years ahead, Max would read thousands of words of description about her, for Tom transformed her into one of his fictional characters, Esther Jack.
Aline Bernstein was forty-two and Tom Wolfe was twenty-four when they met on the deck of the S.S. Olympic in 1925. She was a small but energetic woman, Jewish, with a fresh, ruddy, good-humored face. Tom’s first impression of her was that of a “nice-looking woman” of middle age. She was settled in a passionless marriage. During their affair, Aline Bernstein supported Wolfe in every way through his struggles as an unproduced playwright and then inspired him to write his first novel. Now he found he “greatly admired but no longer loved [her] in the modern sense of the word.” But she still was desperately in love with him.
Tom needed advice, and so he spoke candidly to Perkins of his almost four tender and violent years with this woman old enough to be his mother. Max thought such a matter was beyond his jurisdiction as an editor and evaded the topic on several separate occasions. Finally he said that he did not see “how the relationship could continue and that since she was so very much older, it would certainly eventually have to end.” That was as far as Max would involve himself.
Shortly thereafter, Wolfe sent in his dedication for Look Homeward, Angel. It read “To A. B.” and was followed by six lines of poetry portending farewell—John Donne’s “A Valediction: Of His Name in the Window.” His personal dedication of the first copy of the book to Aline Bernstein spoke of their past together, not their future. “This book was written because of her and is dedicated to her. At a time when my life seemed desolate, and when I had little faith in myself I met her. She brought me friendship, material and spiritual relief, and love such as I had never had before. I hope therefore that readers of my book will find at least part of it worthy of such a woman.” Madeleine Boyd thanked Max again for all he had done for Wolfe and said Tom wanted very much to dedicate his first book to him—“but his
friend Aline Bernstein who sent him to us, has first claims. So I told him I was sure you would not mind waiting for another one. I only wanted you to know by mentioning this how grateful he is, and how he understands what he owes to your kindness, patience, and understanding.”
Wolfe accepted one final suggestion from Perkins by cutting from his foreword all references to his editor’s assistance in shaping his book, then went home to Asheville to prepare its citizens for the publication of Look Homeward, Angel. “I have had a very remarkable visit down here,” Tom wrote Max on a penny postcard. “The town is full of kindness and good will and rooting and boosting for the book. My family knows what it’s all about, and I think is pleased about it, and also a little apprehensive.”
“Although I’m aware of no book that had ever been edited so extensively up to that point,” John Hall Wheelock said about Look Homeward, Angel, “Max felt that what he had done was neither more nor less than duty required.” During all the time of editing the book, Wolfe expressed nothing but admiration and appreciation for Perkins’s literary expertise and accepted the suggestions with grace. Wolfe believed in his writing but trusted Perkins’s opinions deeply. “I have the greatest respect and liking for him,” Tom wrote Madeleine Boyd that year. “My faith is too simple but I believe he can do almost everything to make a book go.” Max felt uneasy about the young author’s growing dependence upon him, but he understood one of Wolfe’s major problems in becoming a writer, namely that he still seemed “to his family to be doing something queer,—something that really wasn’t work in their opinion.” As an artist, Wolfe was made to feel like a one-eyed monster. That someone should have befriended him made him excessive in his gratitude and devotion to his protector, but blind to any dangers in their working together. “He had more respect for an editor then than later,” Max once wrote John Terry, a friend of Wolfe’s from Chapel Hill, in his usual understated manner.
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