XXII
James Jones of Robinson, Illinois, enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1939, transferred to the infantry, rose to the rank of sergeant, and was twice busted to private. He was stationed at Hickam Field in Hawaii when he discovered the writing of Thomas Wolfe. Jones found a number of parallels between his family and the fictitious Gants. “[Wolfe‘s] home life seemed so similar to my own and his feeling about himself so similar to mine about myself,” Jones later recalled, “that I realized I had been a writer all my life without knowing it or having written. Once I made up my mind, it seemed inevitable, something that fate had directed ever since my birth.” In 1944, having been awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, he was honorably discharged and set out upon his writing career.
By February, 1945, Jones, now living in New York, had a finished draft of a very Wolfean novel called They Shall Inherit the Laughter. The next step was obvious: He would take it himself to Charles Scribner’s Sons and the legendary Maxwell E. Perkins. He marched into Scribners, carrying a string-tied Eaton Bond box containing his manuscript, and went to the fifth floor. There an elderly receptionist brought him to a halt. She told him that Mr. Perkins was not in the office but if the manuscript was left with her, it would get a proper reading. Jones said if Maxwell Perkins was not there, he would just leave with his manuscript. The woman disappeared briefly, then reported that Mr. Perkins had just returned to his office through a rear door. She took Jones back to meet him. It was not until a long time later that Jones realized there was no rear door.
The short, stocky twenty-four-year-old entered Perkins’s office expecting to see the face that Wolfe had described in his portrait of Foxhall Edwards. It was quickly apparent to him that Wolfe had exaggerated. Jones found Perkins’s features much more subtle—except for the smile. “That,” he said years afterward, “was as sly as the Fox’s.”
Immediately Perkins steered the conversation to the young man’s army service. They soon were deeply involved in a discussion of the war, and the novel was set aside before Jones had even described it. As their conference on military matters continued, it got late and the staff went home. At last Perkins rose, tugged his hat down over his ears, and led the author to the Ritz Bar for tea.
Perkins did not read the manuscript that night. Instead he gave it next day to two other editors at Scribners, both of whom found it thinly plotted. Perkins was about to decline it on Scribners’ behalf when, impelled by his favorable impression of the author, he browsed through it himself. He found a good deal to admire. “It is a serious attempt to do a big piece of work and the author has the temperament and the emotional projection of a writer,” Perkins wrote the agent Maxwell Aley, who had taken the author under his wing after Perkins had met Jones. “We do not feel however that They Shall Inherit the Laughter quite comes off as a novel, nor does it turn out to be anything for which we could make you an offer.”
Jones, undeterred, devoted most of 1945 to reshaping the novel, then resubmitted his manuscript to Perkins the following January. “I have a number of plans I’m champing to get into action, and all of them hinge on this book,” he explained to Perkins this second time around, sounding much like Fitzgerald in 1919, “whether it is accepted or rejected, whether you will consider that it needs more work (personally, I’m sure it doesn’t but it’s just possible my judgment may be biased) and of course the money angle, how large an advance and how soon. I’m stony broke right now.” While waiting for Max’s reply, he went off to hitch-hike around the country.
Perkins took as much interest in the ideas Jones described in his letter as in the revised manuscript. Among other things, Jones wanted to start another book about the peacetime army just before Pearl Harbor. The type of man he wished to portray in this second novel was somewhat like the reprehensible Flagg or Quirt in What Price Glory?, Maxwell Anderson’s and Laurence Stallings’s drama of World War I. As Jones explained: “Enlisted men spent their entire time in the army pissed off at the officers. And in my army, regimented as it was, men like Quirt and Flagg were made officers again. That class distinction infuriated me, and that was what I wanted to fight in my book.”
In February, 1946, one month after Scribners had received the revised version of They Shall Inherit the Laughter, Jones arrived at his hometown in Illinois. A telegram from Perkins was waiting for him at the home of friends, offering a $500 option on the newly proposed novel, with some further payment to be made after the first 50,000 words had been submitted. WISH TO COOPERATE, Perkins’s wire continued, BUT HAVE MORE FAITH IN SECOND NOVEL AND HAVE FURTHER REVISION TO PROPOSE FOR LAUGHTER. Jones greeted the proposal with mixed emotions. “My vanity was hurt and I didn’t want to throw the first book away after all the work I had put into it,” he said. “But I knew the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe and how Max Perkins had taken chances and worked wonders with their first novels.” After a day or two of deliberation, he telegraphed back: PLACING MYSELF IN YOUR HANDS AND AWAITING LETTER HERE ... WIRE $500 ANY TIME.
Perkins was pleased with Jones’s decision. The new novel was to be the story of a young “go his own way” private named Prewitt coming into contact with First Sergeant Milton Anthony Warden. Perkins believed that Jones had chosen to portray a “perennial character,” and said: “It seemed to us from what you said, that you saw something truly important, and that you were right in your interpretation of the nature of that type of man, and that he had never been portrayed in a way to make him understandable.”
Jones balked at discarding his first manuscript but finally wrote Perkins:
I trust your judgment from past knowledge of your work and your tremendous experience with such things that I don’t have. And I’m willing to ride along....
I think you probably know a lot more about it than I do, which is why I’m willing to lay it aside for Prewitt. As I said, I’m putting myself in your hands, not Scribners’ exactly, but you personally, because I have more faith in your ability to see further and clearer than anybody I’ve met or heard of in the writing game.
Perkins was as eager as Jones was to present the book to the public. Max expected there would be a new postwar literary movement and he wanted to get Jones’s novel published before the new writers would start appearing and begin to crowd the field with second-rate works.
I don’t know that the form of the novel will change much [Perkins wrote Jones], but the spirit and the expression will. Some sense of direction will come in young men who are real writers, almost unconsciously, and as it does, they will formulate it.
Jones had half a dozen private meetings with his editor. “Perkins had an iron control,” he recalled. “From the steady way he walked, you could never tell that he was drunk.” Max seemed eager to instruct him in writing, using the curriculum he had devised over his decades of experience. Perkins’s first piece of advice came from Hemingway, the only survivor of his great triumvirate of the twenties: “Always stop while you are going good. Then when you resume you have the impetus of feeling that what you last did was good. Don’t wait until you are baffled and stumped.” During his first few months of work on the new novel, Jones found the suggestion invaluable.
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 novel
an 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 Mary. 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 Perkins 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.
Editor and author met again the following Monday morning. At that meeting Perkins told Paton, “You are not to worry because you’re not going away with a contract. I don’t see how Scribners could refuse it.” Perkins did not appear so cryptic now, but Paton left for home with only the fuzziest assurances.
During the long voyage, Paton read and reread Thomas Wolfe’s novels. Soon after arriving in Johannesburg, he received Max’s critique of Cry, the Beloved Country. Perkins’s comments on paper were surprisingly straightforward. Paton wrote Burns in April, 1947, and told him that Perkins had said the critics would disparage the story because the final third of the book, the exposition on apartheid, came as an anticlimax after the trial scene, the dramatic peak of the novel. Paton told Burns he thought Perkins was right and stood ready to revise. But the Perkins whom Paton was to experience was a very different editor from the man who had labored so patiently with Thomas Wolfe.
In May, Perkins at last sent Paton the contract for Cry, the Beloved Country. By then Max had come to realize that in the end
the real protagonist is the beautiful and tragic land of South Africa, but if you come to the human hero, it is the Zulu pastor, and he is grand. One might say that the last third of the book is something of an anti-climax, but I don’t think one should look at it in a conventional way. It gives an extraordinary realization of the country and of the race problem, not as a problem but as a situation. It is a sad book, but that is as it should be. So was the Iliad and so is the Bible. But as Ecclesiastes says, “The earth endureth forever.”
Perkins rushed off the manuscript to the printer, then wrote Paton regretfully “that conditions here are such that everything moves very slowly. We do not work enough, that’s the truth-too many holidays, and too short hours.” When Paton admitted he had failed to recognize the importance of the placing of the climax and offered to cut several scenes in the last half of the book, Perkins told him, “It takes so long anyway to publish a book nowadays that I hate to do anything to slow up the progress.” The book was published as written. Perkins was not as demanding of perfection as he once was. Sometimes editing took too much effort now, too much stamina.
Paton resumed his duties in his native land. He wrote Max, “You will be interested to know that you persist in my mind, and that I have a premonition that we shall meet again in the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.”
Cry, the Beloved Country sold exceedingly well and was honored by the critics.
“Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself,” Gilbert Highet wrote in The Art of Teaching. “If you can send him into the world with frames of reference suggested by you and tricks of craftsmanship which he could get only from you, you will have made him your pupil, as much as he will ever be, and earned a right to his permanent gratitude.” Highet cited Perkins in his book as a most “admirable teacher,” commenting that a number of great writers would have wasted their talents had Perkins not shown them “how to direct their Vesuvian force.”
It was in the spring of 1946 that Perkins, whose teaching had been mainly by mail, allowed himself to be recruited as a classroom instructor by Kenneth D. McCormick, the young editor in Manhattan who was conducting an extension course on publishing for New York University. When he invited him to appear as a guest lecturer, McCormick said many years later, “I promised him a class of young hopefuls, and that excited him.”
Storer Lunt, who had recently become president of W. W. Norton and Company, attended the lecture with his company’s vice-president and treasurer, Howard Wilson. Lunt said the whole class sat spellbound, and by the end of the evening Lunt felt they believed as he did, that Perkins “was the embodiment of the perfect editor in his time.”
“His discourse quietly flowed as James Joyce would write,” Lunt recalled, “and I kept thinking now and again of Charles Lamb. Max Perkins was ageless.”
McCormick agreed. “By the end of the evening,” he said, “Perkins had made a total impact. He snowed his audience in the quietest way, without saying a word to polish his own literary reputation.” Over on Broadway, just down the street, Carousel, Oklahoma, Born Yesterday, and The Glass Menagerie were playing. After the lecture, as Howard Wilson and Storer Lunt walked past the theater marquees, the one looked at the other and, speaking of Perkins, said: “That was the best show of the season.” When Perkins had left to catch his train and the students had dispersed, McCormick sat alone in the empty room and thought of something Booth Tarkington had once said, shortly before he died, about how difficult it had become for him to respond to the writing in books he read. “I know all the tricks,” Tarkington remarked; he had spent so many years performing them himself. “In that same way,” said McCormick, “I felt that Max knew all the tricks of his trade and he had grown weary of them.”
Perkins had rushed Paton, a new author, but he still could summon the old energy for his longtime authors like Marcia Davenport. During the first months of 1947, while working on East Side, West Side, she had seen Max several times, mostly for moral support. She told him the book “is too autobiographical fundamentally, and therefore too carefully contrived by me to offset that basic fact, from which I always shy away like a contrary horse. So I am always at war with myself about it and I have a terrible time believing in it.” For the sake of discipline and honoring her word to Perkins, she continued to work on it. At a quarter past four in the morning of April 11, she finished her manuscript, and she brought it to Perkins that afternoon. She realized that he looked tired and frail and was alarmed by the marked tremor of his hands. She thought of how, fifteen years earlier, she had circled the block for two hours before she had dropped off Mozart. “This time,” she told Max, “I am too despairing even to walk around the block. I am just sitting with my head in my hands wondering where I can get a job as a cook.”
Mrs. Davenport wanted to get to Prague; she would revise her book there. Before departing, she stopped off at the Scribner Building to pick up the typescript and Max’s suggestions for the revision, a 3,000-word critique full of support and advice. “I think you have written a notable book in a first draught but that it needs, as any book, to be revised,” he wrote. “The revisions should be almost only a matter of emphasis, for the scheme is right. Having borne the heat of the battle, you must not fail it now.”
East Side, West Side tells the life of a writer named Jessie Bourne during a crucial week in her life, when great changes occur externally and within herself. Perkins’s long letter contained editorial wisdom that applied not only to Mrs. Davenport’s novel but to fiction in general:
Generalizations are no use—give one specific thing and let the action say it....
When you have people talking, you have a scene. You must interrupt with explanatory paragraphs but shorten them as much as you can. Dialogue is action....
You tend to explain too much. You must explain, but your tendency is to distrust your own narrative and dialogue....
You need only to intensify throughout what actually is there—and I think you would naturally do this in revision, anyhow. It is largely a matter of compression, and not so much of that really....
You can’t know a book until you come to the end of it, and then all the rest must be modified to fit that.
“You make the work almost do itself,” Marcia Davenport wrote Perkins from Prague. “I think if I had to struggle alone I would give up.” The first week of June, less than a month after she had gone to Czechoslovakia, Perkins received ten revised chapters. THINK FIRST 121 PAGES SPLENDID IN REVISION, he cabled.
“It is so queer about this book,” she wrote Max. “I have never been able to tell anything about it or whether it is a book at all, and I have to go along like a jackass in a hailstorm content that you are on the job.” She asked nothing more of Max than to watch for the Book-of-the-Month Club’s reaction. If for any reason they wanted to take her novel on one of their delayed-action arrangements, she said, which might cause it to come out near the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s new book, she would flatly refuse. “This book is misery enough for me,” she said, “without having it steamrollered by Hem.”
Mrs. Davenport need not have worried. Even though he had written close to 1,000 handwritten pages of his novel, Hemingway was a long way from publication. Perkins still knew little about the book.
The better part of a decade had passed since Hemingway had published any significant work and Max had become pessimistic about Ernest’s future. Astonishingly, he confided to Louise one day that spring, “Hemingway is through.”
In the spring of 1947, William B. Wisdom finally presented to the Harvard College Library the last of the massive collection of Thomas Wolfe material he had been accumulating for almost ten years. It was at once apparent that the perfect person to write an introduction to the papers was Maxwell E. Perkins, Harvard, Class of 1907. Max agreed to prepare an article for the Harvard Library Bulletin.
Stealing odd moments to write, Perkins continued his work with James Jones, who was living in Illinois and inching ahead with From Here to Eternity. Max did not know the book well enough yet to visualize it as a whole, but in a letter that May, he was able to make a few observations. Jones would always remember one of them especially. If an author worried too much about plot, Max said, he might become “sort of muscle-bound,” whereas he must be flexible. “A deft man may toss his hat across the office and hang it on a hook if he just naturally does it,” Perkins wrote, “but he will always miss if he does it consciously. That is a ridiculous and extreme analogy, but there is something in it.”
That letter, full of warmth and belief as well as good advice, meant a great deal to Jones. “It made me feel like one of his boys,” he said. “That did it.”
“I certainly want to come to New York,” Jones wrote Perkins, “at least for a while to see you. I feel there is so much I can learn from you that will help me.” Perkins never received Jones’s letter.
On Thursday, June 12, 1947, Charles Scribner had lunch with Perkins. Max seemed utterly exhausted, as he had all month, full of fits and twitches. But he still refused to take time off. The following day, he had tea with Caroline Gordon Tate. They discussed her husband’s forthcoming volume of collected poems and several anthologies of fiction and essays that the Tates were doing together. That evening, Perkins went home to New Canaan, his briefcase bulging with manuscripts and galley proofs for the weekend’s reading. By Sunday evening he felt uncomfortable enough to complain. He was running a fever of 103, and his cough was bad. He and Louise thought it was an attack of pleurisy. Next morning, despite her protests, Max got up to go to his office. He ran his bath but was barely strong enough to unbutton his pajamas. By that afternoon Louise suspected that he had pneumonia and called an ambulance. As the attendant came upstairs with a stretcher, Perkins carefully instructed his daughter Bertha to take the two manuscripts by his bed—one of them Cry, the Beloved Country, the other, pages of From Here to Eternity-and put them in Miss Wyckoff’s hands, “and no one else’s.” As he was being carried out of the house, he called for the cook, who for years had lovingly catered to his picky eating habits, and she hurried to see him to the door. He looked at her from the stretcher, smiled and said, as though he knew, “Good-bye, Eleanor.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Perkins. You look beautiful,” she assured him.
In truth his face was drawn and wan. He looked like a dying man. Shortly after he arrived at the Stamford Hospital he was found to have an advanced infection of pleurisy and pneumonia. His chest contracted in pain with every cough. Max helplessly thrashed his arms trying to rip away the smothering oxygen tent that enclosed him. “If I could only have a drink!” he kept crying out, knowing that it would loosen him up. But hospital regulations forbade cocktails.
Louise sat at her husband’s side through the night. The doctors predicted Perkins’s recovery, but penicillin proved powerless against his fatigue with life itself. In the early hours of the morning there seemed to be less strain to his uneven wheezing. Louise, sensing it was the end, pulled up closer to the bed and murmured his favorite lines from Shakespeare, the lament from Cymbeline:
Fear no more the heat o‘ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Though thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Perkins used to say that he wouldn’t mind being dead but dreaded the process of dying. He drifted in and out of sleep. He was as restless as Tolstoi’s dying Prince Andrei, who, aware of some dreadful “thing” that was forcing its way into his room, crawled out of his bed and propped himself against the door.
Once again it pushed from the outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was death ...
At five o‘clock in the morning of Tuesday, June 17, Max lurched up from his bed as though startled by something that had quietly made its way through the door and was standing, waiting, in the morning’s first light. Only Louise was in the room, but he called out to two of their daughters. “Peggoty! Nancy!” Motioning toward the corner, he asked, “Who is that?” He fell back on the bed and died.
Although everyone at Scribners knew that Perkins had been slowly dying, his death stunned them all. “I never had a better friend,” Charles Scribner wrote Hemingway. On Wednesday, the eighteenth, he assembled the company’s editorial staff and divided up the responsibilities which Perkins had long shouldered. Scribner realized his greatest task was “to do all in my power in the next days to fill the void that he left in our organization.” John Hall Wheelock was to assume most of Perkins’s responsibilities. Fortunately, Wallace Meyer and Burroughs Mitchell, Perkins’s latest choice, were there to carry on. Scribner immediately ordered more young men from the lower floors up to the fifth. The editors wrote to their newly assigned authors and did their best to comfort them. “Fortunately,” Scribner told Hemingway, “the best of [them] have decided that it is now up to them to go on writing and do their best, as that would be what Max would have wished.” Hemingway, who had lost several friends that year, remarked to Charles Scribner that it looked as though “our Heavenly Father was perhaps dealing off the bottom of the deck.” He would honor Perkins five years later by dedicating The Old Man and the Sea to him.
Elizabeth Lemmon had given up astrology years earlier, because of all the disasters she had foreseen in the lives of friends and relatives. The morning after Perkins died, her sister read his obituary in the New York Times and rushed to the Church House. She stood in the doorway of her sister’s bedroom and said nothing more than, “Oh, Beth.” Elizabeth sat up and said, “Max is dead.” Days later she wrote Louise. “I have known people who were considered pillars of strength and loved to be leaned on,” she said, “but Max poured strength into people and made them stand on their own feet.” From that time forth, she kept every letter Max had ever sent her, arranged chronologically, in a shoebox in her bedroom.
At twelve o‘clock on Thursday, June 19, 1947, the funeral of Maxwell Evarts Perkins was held at St. Mark’s in New Canaan. Some of the 250 mourners had to stand outside the crowded little Episcopal church. Evartses and Perkinses were there, along with Scribners and the staff, friends from New Canaan, and many others, including Stark Young, Allen and Caroline Gordon Tate, and Hamilton Basso. Chard Powers Smith said he had “never attended a funeral where so many worldly people were crying and concealing it badly.” Hemingway could not be there because of family obligations. Zelda wrote Louise a letter full of comforting religious sentiments. Marcia Davenport was in Prague finishing East Side, West Side, which she dedicated to Perkins. Taylor Caldwell, upon hearing of Max’s death, collapsed and was sent to the hospital. Max’s friend for more than fifty-five years, Van Wyck Brooks, had been seriously ill himself; he had written Louise that his doctor would not allow him to attend the funeral, but, he said, “I shall be thinking of nothing else,—and I shall think of little else for a very long time.” Perkins was buried that afternoon in nearby Lakeview Cemetery, as was his wish. Later, Louise had a High Mass said for him.
James Jones’s letter arrived at Perkins’s office almost a week after the funeral. When Max’s authors had been divided among the staff, Jones had been overlooked. Not until some days later, when Wheelock wrote him, did he know that Perkins had died. Jones wrote Wheelock back, “I have had the feeling for a long time that I should come to New York, that he might die, that I should not selfishly but for writing go where he was because there was so much that I could learn from him. But as I said, life does not ever put two such things together; his time of that was with Thomas Wolfe and not with me.” For days Jones kept thinking of that phrase that drew him to writing in the first place—“O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost.” From Here to Eternity would not appear until 1951. Its great success was a final confirmation of Max’s gift.
Buried under piles of papers on Perkins’s desk was the Introduction to the Thomas Wolfe Collection that he had written for the Harvard Library and had been going over. As Tom’s deathbed letter to Perkins became his last written words, so did Max’s own memorial to Thomas Wolfe become the final words that he edited.
For months after Max died, Louise was adrift. Unanchored without him, she felt lonely and vulnerable. She began having difficulty falling asleep in the upstairs bedroom she had shared with Max and so had special locks installed on all the doors. She had the whole house renovated, adding a connecting apartment. During this period the Church was her support. She talked of entering a convent. Old friends got letters telling of how she prayed that her husband’s soul would receive the mercy and love of God. Molly Colum wrote Van Wyck Brooks that summer: “She writes like an old nun.... Does Louise really believe she knew as much about God as Max did?”
Five years later, after Caribbean cruises, religious pilgrimages, and trips to Europe, Louise was still living restlessly in New Canaan. In June of 1952, her eldest daughter, Bertha, and her son-in-law agreed to move into the family house, and Louise settled into the apartment.
Now in her sixties, she developed a drinking problem. “I feel like such a hypocrite,” she confessed to Elizabeth Lemmon, “going to Mass every morning and getting drunk every night.”
On Sunday, February 21, 1965, firemen were summoned to the New Canaan house at 56 Park Street, where they found smoke pouring from Louise Perkins’s apartment. Her cigarette had set fire to the chair in which she had been sitting. She was rushed to the Norwalk Hospital, suffering from third-degree burns and smoke asphyxiation. She died that night.
A Requiem Mass was offered for her at eleven A.M. the following Wednesday in St. Aloysius’s Church. As a light snow fell, Louise Saunders Perkins was buried by her husband’s side. Their stones are plainly marked with their names and dates and simple crosses at the top. They overlook a tranquil pond, smaller than the one that still mirrors Paradise, around which Max used to take their daughters when he did not have time for a real walk.