Perkins was unhappy about losing both books to Houghton Mifflin and brooded for years over Wilson’s remark about publishers. Caroline Gordon Tate said she never saw Max again without his mentioning it, “sorrowfully rather than resentfully.” Perkins continued to tout Geismar as the best of the up-and-coming literary essayists. Wilson’s criticism was always somewhat personal, he said, while Geismar’s “is detached and yet alive with the enthusiasm that comes from perception of talent.”
“The development of American talent and literature, that was where his main interest lay,” John Hall Wheelock, Perkins’s closest colleague, wrote of the editor. “To the oncoming talents in countries other than his own, he was less alert.” By the 1940s Wheelock had also noticed other aspects of his taste: “Quite a few crotchety prejudices and quirks of unreason, a will ‘immutable and still as stone’—that was Max.... Science and abstract thinking interested him less than did books on controversial subjects or those based upon the application of a theory or ideas. His passion was for the rare real thing, the flash of poetic insight that lights up a character or a situation and reveals talent at work.” Perkins’s partiality toward novels, Wheelock said, became an almost exclusive interest; when he was attracted to a work of nonfiction, it tended to be “crack-pot.” And of late, Wheelock noted, in acquiring authors and helping shape their material “Max often became contrary and contradictory. Just plain Yankee stubborn.”
Frequently, now, Perkins signed up authors, then tried to pawn off on them ideas he had treasured for years. It seldom worked. While Dixon Wecter, for example, was writing a book for Scribners entitled The Hero in America, Max suggested he write a book Max wanted to call The Trouble Makers.
It would be a historical narrative to show how intelligence, in times of crisis, is almost always overcome, and, tragically, by emotion—that the men of good-will, detachment, far-sightedness, and intellect, are overborne by the men of powerful emotions, violence and strong will.
Perkins himself saw the flaw in this premise; he acknowledged that “No progress would be made, perhaps, without the impetuous ones. They do give the impulse which makes things move, even if through destruction.”
In 1942 Perkins was reading proofs of a book that did get published only because of his obstinacy. It was Alden Brooks’s Will Shakespeare and the Dyer’s Hand. For some time the book had been a mania with him. At every editorial conference Perkins brought it up and the board unanimously voted it down. “So, being a man of infinite patience,” one Scribners employee recalled, “he would reintroduce his suggestion at the next conference, with the same result.” What charmed Perkins about the work was that it credited Sir Edward Dyer, an editor, with Shakespeare’s success. Indeed, the book had convinced Perkins that “the man Shakespeare was not the author of what we consider Shakespeare’s works.” Eventually the board gave in, to please Perkins. Max sent copies to many critics, hoping to rouse support. Nearly every one dismissed the work as mere speculation. Still Perkins retained his faith in the book and his respect for it. It made him aware, he told Hemingway, “how frightfully ignorant I am in literature, where a publishing man ought not to be.”
Perkins encountered less opposition and more success editing the nonfiction of James Truslow Adams, the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Founding of New England, The Epic of America, and The March of Democracy. In August, 1941, Adams sent Perkins the introduction and chapter outlines for his newest work, The American. Along with the material came a request. Adams knew few men who personified as many of the nation’s essential characteristics as did Maxwell Evarts Perkins, and so he urged Perkins to set down his observations to help make up this mural of the American character. Max did, and in writing The American, Adams incorporated all of his comments, often quoting him directly.
One of the more striking was on the position and influence of the American woman, which Max said had never been fully treated in any book that he knew of. “When I was a boy in Vermont,” he wrote Adams, “I used to see the middle-aged and old men going to church, not with their wives, not in front of their wives, but about fifteen or twenty feet behind them.” He remembered commenting on it to his mother and her saying with a laugh “that it was supposed to be the New England way.” But Perkins felt it was more than that. New England women, he felt, exerted a moral leadership that was symbolized by their leadership in the march to church. Adams picked up on this point and remarked that whereas American men had regularly tried to place women on pedestals, the women had had the good sense promptly to descend, in order to get on with their work. Perkins, in fact, always respected women who were doers; he wanted them not just to stand on their own two feet but to venture out into the world. No woman writer better embodied this idea of Perkins’s than Martha Gellhorn, whose books Scribners began to publish. Not only was she the consummate venturer; she was also in full control of her career and her prose. She was in that select company of Perkins’s most skilled authors—those who required little help from him.
Some of the others needed a great deal. Following her success with Dynasty of Death, Taylor Caldwell had pulled several large manuscripts from the drawer and sent them to Perkins. He rejected them all. Not deterred, Miss Caldwell sat down and wrote a sequel to Dynasty of Death, called The Eagles Gather. She brought it down from Rochester to New York City in person and asked Perkins for an honest appraisal of the manuscript and of her writing talent in general.
Perkins thought the sequel was weaker than Dynasty of Death. But Scribners published The Eagles Gather, and Taylor Caldwell dedicated it to Perkins. The work did not discourage him about her future in the least. “What you have chiefly,” he wrote her, “is the superb talent for telling a story on a grand scale. It is a mighty rare talent.” Perkins said it was just a question of finding a theme large enough for her. He urged her to try a historical novel. In a letter on October 17, 1939, he said, “I do wish now that you would begin to consider the possibility of that kind of book.” She was impressed with the idea. First she came up with a title, The Earth Is the Lord’s. A few days later, while she was thinking of distant times to explore, Genghis Khan flashed into her head. “Why Genghis Khan,” she wrote to Perkins, “I simply don’t know. All I know about him is that he had an engaging little trick of slaughtering whole populations, and that he overran Asia and part of Europe, and lived somewhere towards the end of the twelfth century, and was a Mongol, son of a Mongol chieftain and a white woman, and was a fine figure of a man, and was definitely NOT Kublai Khan. But fragments keep drifting into my mind, from God knows where.”
Perkins generally believed in letting characters direct the plot of novels, but he instructed Miss Caldwell to think this book entirely through before setting pen to paper. He sent her all the historical information on Genghis Khan within his reach and books that described central Asia. He suggested that instead of making Genghis himself the central figure she should write a strong personal story about someone who accompanied him and suspend the novel from that.
Sometimes a book about periods far back like that and about great epic movements, becomes too generalized, too little about a particular individual or particular individuals. That is a danger you must guard against, particularly with your imagination which tends to see things in the large.
Perkins recommended she read Sir Walter Scott and Dumas to get the hang of writing historicals.
The Earth Is the Lord’s was published in 1941. Critics did not take her history seriously and the book was not a great success. But it served as the model for best-selling fictionalizations of real lives which she would write during the next four decades—Saint Paul, Cicero, and Pericles among them. With his simple intuition that Taylor Caldwell should write historical novels, Perkins had founded one of the most enduring and profitable careers in the history of book publishing, one that continued three decades after his own death.
Another successful author whom Perkins had launched during the thirties was Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. While T
he Yearling was enjoying its two-year tenancy on the best-seller lists—with sales of 500,000 copies, and winning a Pulitzer Prize—Max was thinking about her next book. It was even clearer to him that her gift lay in describing life in the territory she knew. Her writing lost its charm and authority when she departed from it. Perkins advised her to consider a book of true stories about her Florida scrub country.
“Your suggestion about the non-fiction book is actually uncanny,” she wrote back. In fact, she said, she had been thinking of doing just such a work about her home, Cross Creek, before tackling another novel. But she wasn’t yet sure. At the end of the summer of 1940 Mrs. Rawlings sent Perkins several sketches she had written, for his inspection. She asked him to tell her how he saw the book. He replied on September 20 that he envisioned it as being organized around events, with the locale itself as the protagonist.
I think that the book should be a narrative, varied somewhat by description and by reflection—to use a figure it should be a single piece of string, with knots in it, the knots being the episodes, but each connected with the other by the incidents, etc.
Max knew that generalizations would not be enough for Mrs. Rawlings. As she had done while beginning The Yearling, she insisted on receiving detailed directions. And so he let his letter run to 1,800 words, full of specific suggestions. He said, for example, that the opening chapter should run no more than a few pages and proposed that her little piece called “The Road” be worked into it. “Walking along that road,” he pointed out, “could enable you in the most natural way to give, at the start, a conception of the neighborhood.” And that was the way Cross Creek began.
Cross Creek is a bend in a country road, by land, and the flowing of Lochloosa Lake into Orange Lake, by water. We are four miles west of the small village of Island River, nine miles east of a turpentine still, and on the other sides we do not count distance at all, for the two lakes and the broad marshes create an infinite space between us and the horizon. We are five white families; “Old Boss” Brice, the Glissons, the Mackays, and the Bernie Basses; and two colored families, Henry Woodward, and the Mickenses. People in Island Grove consider us just a little biggety and more than a little queer.
Perkins offered other devices for making the episodes mesh—a cycle of the four seasons, to name one. He also told her which characters he thought should reappear and which adventures should be extended. Mrs. Rawlings followed Max’s advice to the letter, and, after four drafts, written in almost two years, Cross Creek became another of her highly acclaimed best sellers.
Nancy Hale’s was another career which had to be guided painstakingly. In her case the problem was not the prose but the author’s morale. Her third novel, The Prodigal Women, had been interrupted by the dissolution of her second marriage and a nervous breakdown.
Perkins’s compassion for troubled writers had not lessened. At about this time he wrote to one author in almost the same words he had used earlier with Thomas Wolfe and Scott Fitzgerald, advising a creative pause:You won’t have lost time for the rest will have made you younger, so to speak. And turning things over in your mind, and reflecting upon them and all, is something that a writer ought to have to do in quiet circumstances once in a while. That is one of the troubles with writers today, that they cannot get a chance, or cannot endure to do this. Galsworthy, who never over-rated himself as a writer but was one of great note in fact, always said that the most fruitful thing for a writer to do was quiet brooding.
For Nancy Hale, Max prescribed this effective remedy. She spent months in the Southwest and at the end of 1941 returned to resume her writing. Again she reached an impasse. Perkins reacted with the calmness of one who had seen this sort of situation often enough not to be daunted by it:You cannot worry me about your novel. I remember so well the quality of all that I saw of it, and I know that you have a rich and sensitive mind and memory. In fact I would be much more concerned if you did not have to go through periods of despair and anxiety and dissatisfaction. It is true that a good many novelists do not, but I think the best ones truly do, and I do not see how it would be otherwise. It is awfully hard work, writing of the kind you do.
I, myself, feel certain that it will end very well indeed, if you can endure the struggle. The struggle is part of the process. There is no sign that Jane Austen had any trouble at all, but I am sure Charlotte Bronte must have had, and almost all of the really good ones, except Jane, who is good as gold, of course.
Nancy Hale overcame her block and worked straight through to the conclusion of The Prodigal Women.
Marcia Davenport’s writing was also interrupted—in 1940, when Wendell Willkie ran for president and she and her husband joined his barnstorming team of speech-writers and policy-makers. Knowing Perkins’s feelings about Roosevelt made her less ashamed about putting aside her novel. Within weeks of Willkie’s trouncing, though, she was back at her story of an industrialist’s family in Pittsburgh. Perkins stayed in close touch with her for the next several months while she drafted the book, sending her short notes periodically, inviting her to tea. His advice throughout remained the same: “Just get it all down on paper and then we’ll see what to do with it.” When she at last delivered it in 1941, the novel was amost 800,000 words long and totally disjointed. It was not until she was deep into the book, she said, that she had realized she could not find her way out. Now she was prepared to scrap it altogether.
Perkins thought The Valley of Decision was the most chaotic manuscript he had ever seen in his life. He brought it home night after night to puzzle over it. Once Louise, not knowing whose manuscript it was but recognizing it by the yellow paper as the same thing that Max had been working on for so many evenings and weekends, said, “Why do you put so much time on that?” Perkins replied: “Because I am a damned fool.” He later told Marjorie Rawlings that he had believed it was “only worth the time because it would not do to allow Marcia to fail on this big undertaking. It might ruin her career to get beaten that way. She was so completely entangled in the underbrush of the book that she could not manage it.” After weeks of slowly going through the manuscript himself, he wrote her:I really think that the great difficulty in bringing “The Valley of Decision” into final shape is the old one of not being able to see the forest for the trees. There are such a great number of trees. We must somehow bring the underlying scheme or pattern of the book into emphasis, so that the reader will be able to see the forest in spite of the many trees. And that will mean reducing the number of trees if we can possibly manage it—though, so far, I haven’t found that easy.
Several readings later, Max organized his suggestions into a series of letters, one of them thirty pages long. His approach to the material was as orderly as that of a genealogist drawing a family tree. He started at the beginning and picked out the most important story lines, those he felt should run through the entire novel; anything that weakened those strands had no business in the book. Ignoring Mrs. Davenport’s divisions, he separated the novel into three major parts and told her the principal purpose of each. Then he provided an extensive chapter-by-chapter breakdown, with detailed commentary. Finally, he clarified the characters for the author, sharpening their definition in short summaries of their traits—all this for a novel he was never quite sure would prove publishable.
Later Marcia Davenport told Malcolm Cowley, “Everything Max does is directed toward the whole effect of the book.... He believes in your characters; they become completely real to him.... He can take a mess of chaos, give you the scaffold, and then you build a house on it.... His dish is a big, long thing full of agony and confusion.” Like so many of his authors, she discovered as she returned to work that Max’s comments were effective almost subliminally; he had a way of gently tossing them out as one would pebbles into a pond, making rings of meaning which enlarged until they touched the author’s consciousness.
Mrs. Davenport put Perkins’s letter on one side of her typewriter and the manuscript on the other, and revised her novel accord
ing to his plan. The job took five months. Perkins assumed the outcome would be perfunctory, but she surprised him. She rewrote nearly the entire book, reorganizing and tightening it with great speed and skill, and she cut the length almost in half. “She is a woman of character and determination,” Perkins told Marjorie Rawlings. As for Marcia Davenport, everywhere she went she sang Max’s praises, giving him full credit for his help, calling it a “case of Trilby and Svengali.” Max readied the novel for publication in 1942, hardly suspecting the immense success it would attain.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor intensified Max’s obsession with the war, and he read everything about it he could find. As usual, Elizabeth Lemmon was his relief. “No use to talk about the war,” he wrote her on December 23, after almost a year of silence. “You have always managed to more or less stay home,” he observed, “and I think that was probably the wisest and happiest thing that could be done.” Max himself was becoming home-bound, office-bound, reducing his own social contacts. Even Windsor saddened him now. “I don’t like to go there,” he admitted, “and it is hard to see how, as memories accumulate through the generations, people can stay in one place through hundreds of years. The past would be too much with them, I should think. You want to get back there, but it can’t be done. You can’t go home again.”
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