Another of the editor’s rules of thumb impressed him.
I remember reading somewhere what I thought was a very true statement [Perkins wrote him], to the effect that anybody could find out if he was a writer. If he were a writer, when he tried to write, out of some particular day, he found in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt, and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it, they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense, but that ability is at the bottom of writing, I am sure.
In July, 1946, Jones had enough pages of his novel to show, and he sent them to Perkins, who wrote back this reaction:I do not know whether this book will sell, and I think there will be a very hard struggle in cutting it and shaping it up, but I think it exceedingly interesting and valid. The Army is something and I don’t think anyone ever approached presenting it in its reality as you have done. I think though that one reason it needs a great deal of cutting is that you explain too much. You give too much exposition.... When you come to revise, you must try to make the action and talk (which is a form of action) tell us all, or almost all.
For years Jones remembered the pain he felt when he read the words “When you come to revise.” He said, “They stuck like a barb in my ass.” But Perkins’s writing lessons were making sense. “Eventually,” Jones recalled, “something happened in my head: the concept of a paragraph came to me for the first time. I realized the power I held to raise or lower a reader’s emotional level by where I ended a paragraph.” At the same time Jones—whose parents died while he was overseas—was becoming increasingly dependent on Perkins. “I was too modest to even think I could ever replace Tom Wolfe—you can only have a first son once,” Jones said, “but I had made a father figure out of Max Perkins.”
Later in 1946, Jones came up with a title for his novel: From Here to Eternity. He told Perkins he had taken it from the Yale “Whiffenpoof Song”: “Gentlemen songsters out on a spree, damned from here to eternity ...” Perkins liked the title very much, but as his daughters could have told Jones, having heard it read to them by their father, the phrase was a refrain from “Gentleman Rankers,” one of Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads.
By the end of 1946, Perkins had received over 200 pages of From Here to Eternity. That same winter, Perkins’s physical condition resumed its deterioration. His cough had developed into gasping attacks. His hands were so palsied that he often apologized for his jagged, occasionally illegible handwriting. He was drinking more than he ever had before.
That some year Perkins took on another young man who had gone to war, Vance Bourjaily. While in the Pacific, Bourjaily had written a play and sent it home to his mother, a successful novelist. She gave the manuscript to her agent, Diarmuid Russell, who in turn sent it to Perkins. After reading the play, Perkins matter-of-factly asked Russell if “this young fellow” wanted to write a novel; then he loaded the question with a cash offer. The agent immediately cabled Bourjaily, relaying Scribners’ proposal of a $750 advance for a work of prose. “At that moment,” Bourjaily recalled, “I ceased to be a playwright and became a novelist.”
Once stateside, Bourjaily wrote the first draft of The End of My Life, a novel about a young man’s mental and moral disintegration during World War II, which he had deliberately left “tantalizingly unresolved.” He quickly revised it and sent it to Perkins. In December, 1946, days after receiving the pages, Max summoned the author.
Max Perkins was by now a legend to every young American author with a book to write, and for the time that Bourjaily was with him, he lived up to the legend. They met at Scribners. Bourjaily found the editor behind his desk, wearing his hat. Perkins greeted him gruffly, then, without volunteering a word about the manuscript, said, “Well, let’s go eat.” They went to Cherio’s, where Bourjaily encountered, as James Jones had, a new aspect of Perkins’s behavior. That most modest editor now seemed aware of his reputation, and for almost two hours, without prompting, spoke of his work with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe, automatically reciting the suggestions he had made to them over the years. Bourjaily sat in awe.
The moment their coffee arrived, Perkins turned to the author and said, “Now about your book—you’ve got to write a last chapter. You have to tell us how it comes out. Also the girl Cindy—she’s so important a character, you can’t wait so long as you do to introduce her. You’ll have to write a first chapter.” Within thirty seconds, Bourjaily’s manuscript had been analyzed, two major deficiencies identified, and the solutions specified. He saw for himself that Max Perkins possessed an “infallible sense of structure,” and that for Perkins the discovery of young writers and the editing of their works were no longer challenging and exciting but, in fact, routine. Bourjaily said “Yes sir” to both of Perkins’s directives, thanked him for the lunch, and went home to write an opening and closing for his book. It was published the following year and auspiciously began his enduring writing career.
One day in January, 1946, having seen little of the Connecticut countryside since the war began, except what was visible from his commuter train, Max took the car out for a spin, even though he had no driver’s license. “It was too dark a night to see much,” Perkins later wrote Hemingway, “and after a while I thought I would come back and do some work, and so I was driving too fast, I guess. Anyhow—I came around an easy curve and after a minute saw the shadow of a truck ahead. I don’t think there was a tail light. I thought of skidding around it but a man might have got out. It stood right in the middle of the road. I did everything I could with the brake, but I must have hit the truck hard because it certainly wrecked my car, all the front of it. I got right out, and felt all right except that to my surprise my nose bled.” The two truckers towed Perkins home, and he felt fine the next day. But the day after, he was so stiff he could hardly hold the telephone. Just breathing was painful and coughing was excruciating. A doctor strapped Max’s cracked ribs with adhesive, but that did little good and he resented doctors’ remedies anyway. Instead Max fashioned his own corset with cardboard and cinched it around his chest with a belt. He wore it for weeks. One of Perkins’s daughters insisted that he no longer drink so much and then drive. Max gave up driving. For two months he suffered from the pain, but to him suffering was therapeutic. He applied the same reasoning in arctic weather, when he would walk out to lunch without wearing an overcoat. “Max, aren’t you cold?” a concerned colleague asked one day. “Cold?” he growled. “I’m freezing!”
That summer, 1946, Louise was wrongly diagnosed as having gall-stones and underwent surgery. The doctors discovered an ulcer of the duodenum. Her health was feeble for months. Max worried about her, and Charles Scribner started worrying about him. At lunch and in their morning meetings, he could not keep his eyes off Perkins’s trembling hands. “He needs a rest badly, but refuses to take a vacation,” Scribner wrote Hemingway confidentially. “There does not seem to be anything he wants to do except work. I wish you could lure him away, but for heaven’s sake don’t tell him that I suggested such an idea.”
Hemingway was in Sun Valley with his fourth wife, the former Mary Welsh. She had been a reporter for Time and Life when they met during the war. They were married within three months of his divorce from Martha Gellhorn. In his next letter to Max, Ernest praised the countryside and extended an invitation to come to Sun Valley. But a short time later, Ernest mentioned Max’s condition to a mutual friend, and when Perkins heard that Hemingway thought he was sick, he insisted he was not. To prove it, he worked through the summer, right past his sixty-second birthday in September, and straight through into the new year.
Six years had passed since the publication of his last novel when Ernest Hemingway began work on The Garden of Eden. The Hemingway scholar Carlos Baker called this unfinished novelan experimental compound of past and present, filled with astonishing ineptitudes and based in part upon memories of his marriages to Hadley and Pauline, with some excursions behind the scenes of his current life with Mar
y. For his opening chapters he chose the locale of the seaport village of Le Grau-du-Roi at the foot of the Rhone estuary. This was the place in which he had spent his honeymoon with Pauline in May, 1927. Like Ernest at that time, the hero, David Bourne, had been married only three weeks and was the author of a successful novel. His wife Catherine fiercely shared his hungers and his pleasures. He devoted his days to her fanatical desire to tan her body by lying naked on hidden beaches. Their nights were given to experiments with the transfer of sexual identities in which she assumed the name of Pete and he the name of Catherine.
Perkins knew Ernest had been working “damned hard” on the book, but nothing more. Indeed, communications from Ernest had all but ceased. Max was understanding. “It is wonderful that you correspond at all except when you have to,” he wrote. “I can’t imagine doing a hard day’s work at writing and then begin to do letters.” Perkins’s own letter-writing had fallen off—more than a year had passed since his last letter to Elizabeth Lemmon—as he attended to the disappointing manuscripts that were submitted. Writing letters, he said, “require[s] thought and one does not get time to think anymore.”
What Perkins did think about that year was the deaths of more friends. After years of pain, Edward Sheldon finally died. So did the Irish critic and writer, Ernest Boyd, Madeleine Boyd’s husband. Even closer to home was the tragic death of one of Max’s nieces, who was run down by a bus on Fifth Avenue; Max’s daughters were now saying they would never stay in Windsor again because of their memories of being with their cousin there. Perkins had given up Windsor long ago for similar reasons. “I do not see how the English go on living for generation upon generation, forever in the same place,” Max wrote a friend, “where so much tragedy must have accumulated.”
Charles Scribner’s Sons commemorated their hundredth year of “responsible publishing” in 1946 with an informal history of their house entitled Of Making Many Books. It was written by Roger Burlingame, whose father had been a senior editor at Scribners when Perkins joined the firm thirty-six years earlier. Burlingame described Scribners’ struggle to keep its standards even though the manufacturing costs had risen 100 percent in the last six years, mostly because of increased wages. Elsewhere the refined and gentlemanly business of publishing had yielded to the modern impersonal and statistical methods of operation. Scribners was trying desperately to hold on to its established ways. It was still emphatically a family firm. As president, Charles Scribner worked in the old north office, beneath the portraits of his father and grandfather. He welcomed his visitors, authors and employees, “with a mellowness of humor,” Burlingame noted, “which it has taken, perhaps, three generations of experience and renewing youth to evolve.” Maxwell Perkins, as he had been for well over a decade, was in command of all editorial affairs, continuing “as he works to doodle portraits of Napoleon which with each passing year bear a more and more convincing resemblance to Maxwell Perkins.” And a new generation was settling into place. Scribner’s son, the fourth Charles, had taken a desk in the advertising department, and George McKay Schieffelin, another of old CS’s grandsons, was home from the navy and working again for the company. Several others had been taken on, including a young man out of Bowdoin College, Burroughs Mitchell, who would himself become a noted editor.
Some of the younger Scribners employees were worried that Max was losing his touch. Years later the fourth Charles Scribner recalled: “Max was passing up a number of obvious sure things—outstanding books—thereby missing out on good new authors.” At the same time, he was taking chances on long shots by certain regular authors, so afraid of disappointing them that he could not bring himself to turn them down. Moreover, the new men at Scribners felt that Perkins did not even want to listen to them. At the editorial conferences, he hardly permitted any of the others to speak up. He himself presented all the prospective books, often in a manner which the fourth Charles Scribner described as “Pickwickian in the extreme.” Scribner felt that Perkins was overloading the list with second-rate fiction, and was not alert to the country’s new hunger for nonfiction.
On the other hand, Perkins’s contemporary John Hall Wheelock said, “With all the considerations before him—artistic, financial and otherwise, Perkins maintained that in the long run, one would do best by publishing the best work that appeared before him. There was the soothing writing, the books that delighted; and there was the writing that instructed, written from an author’s vision of reality.” Throughout his career, Wheelock said, Max maintained that “it has not yet been decided which is right. Considering both, he insisted that he was simply devoted to talent.” Van Wyck Brooks wrote: “If Max was to be remembered many years after he died,—remembered far better than most of the authors he worked for,—it was largely because of his sympathetic understanding and because of the standards he maintained.” Perkins was certain that the immortal books addressed themselves to the literate and the masses alike. “The great books,” he said, “reach both.”
In 1947 Maxwell Perkins was brought one such book. It came to him through a man named Aubrey Burns, who worked for the National Conference of Christians and Jews in San Francisco. “About the middle of December [1946] an unassuming man with a British accent appeared in the NCCJ office in San Francisco,” Burns remembered. It was Alan Paton, on leave from South Africa’s Department of Education to make an investigative tour of prisons and reform schools around the world. Attracted by the stranger’s wit and compassion, Burns insisted that Paton stay with him and his wife, Marigold, as long as he was in northern California. Paton agreed on one condition. “I have in my suitcase the manuscript of a novel,” he said, “and I will come only if both of you promise to read it and tell me where it irritates you.”
A few evenings later, when they were sitting around the cleared dining room table, Paton reached into his valise and brought forth a manuscript called Cry, the Beloved Country. It was a few hundred pages long, penned in a tight cursive. “I found it difficult to read,” Burns remembered, “partly because of the handwriting, partly because of the strangeness of the names, but chiefly because it is difficult to read small script through water—tears rose up as from a mountain spring, from one phrase to another, and from one emotion to another.” It took Burns only a moment to realize he was reading a work of genius. The novel was the story of a Zulu country pastor in South Africa who had come to the city and discovered that his sister had been forced into prostitution and his brother was on trial for murder. After the trial, two-thirds of the way through the book, the plot largely gave way to a revealing account of apartheid in South Africa.
The Burnses were sure that any publisher would be eager to print this manuscript. But Paton still had to revise the last half and in any case had no time. His fixed itinerary had him leaving on a freighter from Halifax, Canada, back to Cape Town. His money was running low, and he was sure no editor would read an untyped manuscript.
Marigold Burns suggested that Paton leave the manuscript for her to type so that she and her husband might submit it for Paton. Burns said he would write a letter to accompany the first five chapters, explaining that the author could not yet submit his work for publication in its entirety and that he was sending those same pages to five publishers simultaneously as a sample of the work; anyone interested in seeing the whole book had only to respond. Paton accepted the plan and departed. Burns sent out the typed manuscript to five publishers, including Max Perkins at Scribners. For Perkins, Burns wrote a special letter. Thinking of Foxhall Edwards, Burns tried to offer some sense of Paton and said, “Alan [is] a shy person, not inclined to press his own cause.” Within days two houses had asked to read the conclusion of the manuscript. Scribners was one of them, and Perkins wrote that he was eager to meet the author. Responding to Burns’s description of Paton as modest, Perkins said: “I am extremely shy and I believe we two could get on most comfortably together.”
At 4:30 on February 7, 1947, Paton arrived at the Scribner Building in New York and found that Per
kins could not have been more wrong about being comfortable to be with. The afternoon was for Paton a bizarre encounter. Paton could not tell whether Perkins was moved by the book or not. Perkins said the book was “biblical,” but Paton did not know whether this was praise or just a recital of fact. Toting the manuscript, Max escorted the author to another man on the fifth floor and said, “Charles, we must take this.” Only later did Paton realize that the unintroduced co-worker was, in fact, Charles Scribner himself. When Perkins asked Paton if he ever drank, the writer hesitated, wondering if a “biblical” author was expected not to. They went to a bar and had several, but the drinks did not help. Paton’s confusion only multiplied. As he later reported to Aubrey Burns:He lifted his glass in toast, but he didn’t say what the toast was. He told me all about Thomas Wolfe. He said, of course you may not make much money. We can’t guarantee that the public will buy.... I offered him a second drink, but he paid for that too. He said, you can pay next time, but didn’t say when that time would be. I thought I would give a practical turn to the conversation by saying, here’s to our association, but beyond drinking, he made no other answer.
Over the last of their drinks Max said that South Africa must be a sad country. Paton asked why and, without knowing of Max’s hearing defect, found it odd that Perkins did not respond. “Whether he was just being shy or whether he was in the presence of something strange, I don’t know,” Paton reported. The “queer party” ended brusquely when Perkins departed to catch his train home to New Canaan. Paton was left so bewildered that he asked Aubrey Burns to write Perkins and find out what he thought of the book.
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