The editors of The New Yorker had first proposed the idea of writing a profile on Perkins to Thomas Wolfe in the thirties. Wolfe assigned his agent, Elizabeth Nowell, to learn if Perkins would consent to such a piece. “Perkins seemed to pretend to pooh-pooh it but wouldn’t flatly refuse,” Miss Nowell recalled, “and Tom and I wondered if he might secretly—beneath his shyness—rather like the idea.” Still trying to figure him out, she finally went to his office one day and said, “Goddamit, Mr. Perkins, do you want a New Yorker profile of you or not? Answer yes or no.” He scowled at her reproachfully and said, “Miss Nowell, you’re a Yankee too?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well then,” he said, “you ought to know better than to ask me that.”
Wolfe dropped the project, but years later the critic Malcolm Cowley picked it up, and The New Yorker encouraged him. Cowley believed there was no person so important in the field of contemporary literature who at the same time was so unknown as Maxwell Perkins. Just what an editor did was a mystery to those outside the book trade, and Cowley believed Perkins obscured what little there was to be seen by standing in the shadows, like some “gray-hatted eminence.” Before seeking an interview with Perkins, Cowley set about collecting facts. “Perkins, I discovered, is the nearest thing to a great man now existing in the literary world,” he explained to William Shawn, his editor at The New Yorker. “Legends are clustered round him like truffles round an oak tree in Gascony.” In late 1943, after months of research—correspendence and interviews with Perkins’s friends, authors, and colleagues, and much digging up of details—Cowley was ready to confront the Fox himself.
A literary figure of importance and a charming man as well, Cowley soon worked his way past Perkins’s pathological self-effacement. Perkins spent some time diminishing his own accomplishments (“I don’t see why they give us credit for discovering books when we merely read manuscripts.”) and blustering about the obscenity of being written about; then he settled down and acquiesced to a formal interview. In fact, he submitted to several sessions.
At one point he told Cowley that the man he would most like to resemble was Major General John Aaron Rawlins. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, Rawlins was “the most nearly indispensable” officer of General Grant’s staff. It was his job to keep Grant sober; edit his important papers and put them in final form; apply tact and persistence in order to make critical points; and often restore the general’s self-confidence.
During their time together, Cowley and Perkins discussed contemporary writers. Lately, Robert Penn Warren had become of interest to Perkins; and, of course, William Faulkner had attracted his attention early on. Perkins was most enthusiastic about Faulkner’s early books and had never read anything he had written since without admiration. “My only fear about him,” he told Cowley, “is that he has fallen into a certain position which is not nearly as high as it should be, and once that happens to a writer, it is extremely difficult to change the public’s opinion. Anyone would be proud to publish him, but I would only be afraid that we could not do enough better than his present publishers to satisfy him.”
One of Faulkner’s most admiring interpreters, Cowley was aware that the author had been relegated to limbo. When he sent his Mississippi friend a “New York market report” on his current standing as a literary figure, Cowley wrote, “In publishing circles your name is mud. They are all convinced that your books won’t ever sell, and it’s a pity, isn’t it? they say, with a sort of pleased look on their faces.” Faulkner had written seventeen fictional works, then all out of print, bearing the imprints of a half-dozen houses. Now Cowley advised him to find still another publisher. He thought of Scribners because of his respect for Max Perkins and what he assumed Perkins felt for Faulkner’s writing. So, not long afterward, he talked to Max about the author, only to find Perkins less than eager. Perkins had long regarded the man as a virtuoso, but thinking of the author’s future writing rather than his reputation, he told Cowley emphatically, “Faulkner is finished.”
It was implicit in all Perkins’s comments to Cowley that he had little faith in the writing of the forties and even less hope for that which would follow. “Perhaps the trouble with literature in our time,” he told Cowley, “is that there aren’t as many rascals as there used to be.”
Cowley completed his interviews and went off. While he was writing, Perkins tended to business. One current project involved not a rascal but a delightfully mischievous author, Arthur Train. After Train’s success in writing his own autobiography, Perkins had suggested that he write the definitive story of Mr. Tutt, his celebrated hero whose fictitious adventures had delighted millions of readers over the last quarter-century. The result was Yankee Lawyer: The Autobiography of Ephraim Tutt, with an introduction by Train. The book was “authenticated” with “photographs” of young Tutt and his portrait from the Saturday Evening Post in his familiar pose of his thumbs grabbing his waistcoat—a portrait which, curiously enough, bore no small resemblance to Max Perkins. Upon the publication of Yankee Lawyer in 1943, people who had admired Tutt’s legal skill but had wondered whether or not he was imaginary, hopped onto the side of belief. Every mail delivery brought letters to the publishers from people anxious to retain Mr. Tutt’s counsel. One lonely old woman propositioned him. Another woman called Scribners and was accidentally switched onto Max Perkins’s private wire. For a long time she refused to accept his assurance that there was, in fact, no Ephraim Tutt. “But there must be a Mr. Tutt,” she insisted, and when finally convinced, she began to sob.
Then the literary prank boomeranged. In March, 1944, a marshal from the New York Supreme Court served Arthur Train with a summons. The complainant was Lewis R. Linet, a Philadelphian, who described himself as “a lawyer given to reading, who, deceived by the jacket, title-page, illustrations and printed content of Yankee Lawyer, had been tricked into parting with three dollars and a half in exchange for a piece of spurious fiction.” Linet sought a rebate of $1 on the purchase price, not just for himself, but for each of the 50,000 other purchasers of the book. He was also suing Charles Scribner’s Sons and the author’s editorial co-conspirator, Maxwell E. Perkins, for “fraud and deceit.”
The story, when it broke in the press, seemed so incredible that Perkins was accused of having cooked the whole thing up as a publicity stunt. But the injunction and $50,000 rebate that Linet sought were a matter of court record. The defendants retained the best lawyer they could think of, John W. Davis, former Democratic candidate for president, ex-ambassador to England, and an admirer of Mr. Tutt for years. It was true that misinterpretations of fact were subject to suit; the question was whether or not rules for commodities applied also to books. The defense’s argument was rooted in the literary tradition of apocryphal biography or historical narrative for purposes of political or literary satire. Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, both published as bona fide accounts, were obvious examples. While the case was still pending, Arthur Train died, before seeing Mr. Tutt cleared of charges.
Another unusual project occupying Perkins late in 1943, when Mr. Cowley came to call, involved a thirty-five-year-old man from Junction City, Kansas. Joseph Stanley Pennell (“rhymes with kennel,” he used to say) had completed his first novel, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters, just before his induction into the army. A friend had consented to handle the business of selling his manuscript, and she sent it to Scribners in early 1943. Perkins first learned of the book when he overheard two of his associates talking about it. One of them said, “Another of those damned works of genius.” Some editors are put off by brilliant but idiosyncratic manuscripts and some, such as Perkins, are enticed by them. Perkins took the book home and started to read. The syntax and punctuation were unconventional, and in general the difficulties in the manuscript seemed insuperable, but Max found value. He told a friend: “An editor does not come across such talent more than five or six times in his life. And when he does, he is bound to do what he c
an for it.”
If that declaration echoed Max’s reaction to Thomas Wolfe, it was no wonder. Pennell had been inspired by Wolfe, and his book bore many similarities to Wolfe’s work. First there was the clearly autobiographical nature of the story, written in keeping with Wolfe’s dictum that “we are the sum of all the moments of our lives”; practically all Pennell’s moments seemed to be in the book. Fork City, Kansas, Pennell’s name for his hometown of Junction City, was the equivalent of Wolfe’s Altamont. The prose often had the quality of blank verse, and Pennell’s chapters were often introduced by sections of italicized lyrical philosophy, some of which could have passed for Wolfe’s own dithyrambs; indeed, Pennell’s narrator, Lee Harrington, went Eugene Gant one better and actually composed sonnets to his lady, a beautiful blonde named Christa, to whom he was recounting the story of his ancestors in hopes of impressing her, and the sonnets were inserted in the narrative. Finally, Pennell intended his novel to be the first in a trilogy, which he was calling An American Chronicle.
Perkins found Rome Hanks a complicated admixture of narrations, flipflopping between centuries, blending a contemporary love story with a retelling of the Civil War. After several days with the tricky manuscript, he wrote Pennell and admitted that he had “not yet got the hang of the book—don’t know exactly what the motive is of mixing the present with the past, etc.” But, he added, “I am having a grand time reading it, and I should like to tell you that a colleague here showed me that Pickett’s Charge piece, and I really do not believe I ever saw a war piece that excelled it, not forgetting Tolstoi.”
Perkins was excited and tantalized. Undoubtedly he sensed that Rome Hanks offered him the possibility of another Tom Wolfe. But he was careful not to raise Pennell’s expectations too much. He had not finished the book, and he already saw problems arising. On March 29, 1943, he wrote Pennell again:We have all said we have got to find some way of publishing this book, and yet there are some obstacles that are very serious, and that in fact can only be got over by drastic elimination. And I don’t know whether you will consent to it. Yet I do think you should publish, and I don’t think any publisher could publish a good many things that are in your book.
Perkins’s first objection was that the contemporary parts seemed trivial as compared to the historical passages. The reader, he said, was conscious as he read the modern story thatit did not blend with the rest, and was not equal with it,—and that in fact while one was reading those parts, he was impatient to get back to the early America, the war and after the war.
The second difficulty with the modern tale was that most of the “obscene” material was there; Perkins felt that much of the love story could not be printed as written. And then there was Christa, the object of the hero’s love poems. With her St. Louis background and blonde, leggy looks she resembled Martha Gellhorn so much that Perkins feared libel; the similarity, he said, was “unmistakable unless there has been a most amazing series of coincidences.” Perkins told Pennell that nobody could print this portrait of her without being sued; and in any case, since Scribners published Miss Gellhorn, they could not defame her, whatever the law. “It does seem to me that you would have produced something masterful,” Perkins wrote, “and even conceivably better than it is now, if you took out most of what is contemporary, and merely gave the Civil War and post Civil War days—the old America.”
Pennell, now in California, replied that he had considered the “drastic elimination” which Perkins urged but found it hard to accept. “First,” he explained, “there is the perhaps unreasonable love of one’s own words, and second, there is the plan of the longer work of which Rome Hanks is a part.” Still, Pennell wanted to weigh Max’s proposals a little longer. “Life, Sir,” he said, “is most strange and wonderful—and it seems extremely amazing to me that I should sit here, near some guns in California, writing this to you in New York, whom I had for some time admired as a name with certain qualifications and then as a portrait in a book by a man from North Carolina—a man who died searching for a leaf and a door.”
The whole matter gnawed at Perkins. He wanted the book, but he felt he had to alter it. Experimenting, he removed all the contemporary parts of the manuscript, then gave the remainder to another Scribners editor to read. Afterward, Perkins showed the man what had been deleted. This man, Max reported to Pennell, “with much more certainty than I who am also not very confident of my judgments, believes that this book itself would be a finer one without the contemporary parts.” But, said Perkins, still not offering a contract, “you must not let me beguile you into going against your own opinion.”
Pennell finally agreed to Perkins’s prescription. For the better part of a year they worked together through the mail. Both compromised. Pennell worked within Perkins’s boundaries but sandwiched in a few of his modern-day interludes. Christa was no longer so clearly based on Martha Gellhorn.
“What a joke if Martha picked the wrong genius!” Marjorie Rawlings wrote Max, after learning about the novel. Perkins spoke of the book to everyone, for none in years had excited him so much. He read pages aloud to friends in the evening and handed out advance copies to visitors to his office. And when The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters was published, in the summer of 1944, it appeared that his enthusiasm was justified. The novel ran through its entire first printing overnight and commanded national attention. “Nobody is going to be so foolish as to argue that the novel is flourishing particularly these days, because it just isn’t,” Hamilton Basso began his review in the July 15, 1944, New Yorker, but there is evidence around ... to suggest that those who are waiting to nail down its coffin lid might, at least for the time being, put those hammers away.... [Rome Hanks is] a book which, unless I am greatly mistaken, will cause more fuss than any first novel since Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.
One thing that is bound to happen, and I will lay bets, is that Mr. Pennell, an ex-newspaperman now in the Army, is going to be hailed, by those who go in for hailing, as another Thomas Wolfe. There will be some reason for this, because Mr. Pennell, like Wolfe, commits just about every sin known to literary man, and, again like Wolfe, thinks up a few ones all his own.
Within six months of publication, Rome Hanks sold close to 100,000 copies.
While Rome Hanks was making its author’s reputation, Malcolm Cowley’s profile appeared in The New Yorker and gave Max the fame he had for so long fled. It was entitled “Unshaken Friend,” a phrase from Wolfe’s dedication of Of Time and the River, and it was published in two successive issues in April, 1944. Profiles so long they had to be published in two parts were rare for the magazine, but William Shawn had been convinced that Perkins was every bit as important as Cowley made him out to be. In the first shock of his notoriety, Max went so far as to consult a lawyer as to what means might be taken to suppress the articles, but he never carried the effort any farther. Instead, he sought to distance himself from the portrait. When asked about the articles, he told several people: “I wouldn’t mind being like that fellow.” The man in the profile, he said, was “a great sight better person than myself.” Perkins’s friends said he groused for weeks about Cowley’s comment that he dressed in “shabby and inconspicuous grays.” “I felt like telling him,” Cowley wrote William Shawn, “that if The New Yorker said he dressed in shabby and inconspicuous grays, by God he dressed in shabby and inconspicuous grays.”
In time Perkins concluded that he had come off rather well in the articles, and he was pleased that Cowley had often moved away from Max himself and expanded into an informative discussion of publishing. But the articles caused trouble for Perkins. It seemed for a while that every would-be writer in America had read Cowley’s depiction of the loyal and compassionate editor and his gift for identifying neglected talent, and had been stirred to seek his services. The flow of manuscripts into Scribners became nearly overwhelming, and Miss Wyckoff had all she could do to fend off phone calls from strangers. And visitors. Cowley had quoted Max as saying, “One can t
ell as much by seeing an author as by reading the manuscript,” whereupon unpublished authors began demanding to be seen.
That spring Max’s friend and neighbor Hendrik Willem van Loon died. The same week, Colonel John William Thomason, the author and illustrator of such Scribners books as Fix Bayonets and Jeb Stuart, died in the Naval Hospital in San Diego at fifty-one. That summer Perkins was further grieved by the horrible progressive illness of an even closer friend, the playwright Edward Sheldon. Sheldon, whom Max had known since Harvard, had been bedridden with arthritis for fifteen years. Now the disease had rendered him deaf, dumb, and blind, and had frozen him completely rigid. He existed in a dreadful monotony of dark, silent days.
And then Perkins’s own health began to deteriorate in ways that even he could not ignore. One day one of his ankles and both his hands swelled up alarmingly. The doctor told him it was probably exhaustion. Perkins said he didn’t feel tired, though he realized that he wasn’t reading as attentively as before. He was persuaded to take time off, and for two weeks he mainly slept.
Perkins had had a great-grandmother who used to say, “It’s wicked to be sick,” and he had always acted as if he believed her. Now, however, Louise was able to coerce him into having a thorough medical examination. To his own amazement the tests turned out favorably. There was nothing dreadfully wrong—just fatigue. But the doctors were distressed that Perkins seemed to be getting about one third of his nourishment from alcohol, and that he wasn’t eating nearly enough.
In recent years Max had become increasingly fussy about food. He showed little interest even in his standbys—breast of guinea hen and the Ritz’s house special of venison. Louise dreamed up tempting meals for the cook to prepare, but he never ate them. (The two youngest girls, Jane and Nancy, once drew up a list of foods which he would agree to eat if placed before him, and they made him sign it. It was probably the only contract he ever willfully broke.) The doctor put Perkins on vitamins and limited him to two cocktails a day; Max indulged in a third on weekends. The cocktails made him less aware of his loneliness and the passage of time. “Everything moves too fast nowadays,” he told Marjorie Rawlings, “and John Barleycorn slows things up. I had always thought that if I got very old, I would take up hashish, which completely destroys the sense of time, so that you sit in eternity.”
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