“A writer’s best work,” he said, “comes entirely from himself.” He warned the students against any efforts by an editor to inject his own point of view into a writer’s work to try to make him something other than what he is. The rural Yankee who had stumbled in out of the rain hours earlier had transformed himself before them into the very legend of their imaginings.It was still raining hard.
Moreover, Perkins had never seen any point in discussing his career—until McCormick’s invitation. For another, he believed that book editors should remain invisible; public recognition of them, he felt, might undermine readers’ faith in writers, and writers’ confidence in themselves. A well-stuffed briefcase in one hand and an umbrella in the other, he left the bar and ventured into the downpour drenching mid-Manhattan. He headed west toward a small storefront on 43rd Street, several blocks away.McCormick called the class to order, thumping the collapsible card table in front of him with the palm of his hand, and began the session by describing the job of editor. Max Perkins discovered Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Tom Wolfe, among others and was their editor and friend. Wolfe had once written that they were “full of a strange misty light, a kind of far weather of the sea in them, eyes of a New England sailor long months outbound for China on a clipper ship, with something drowned, sea-sunken in them.”
“If you have Mark Twain, don’t try to make him into a Shakespeare or make a Shakespeare into a Mark Twain.
McCormick knew why. “It means you’re through.”“Oh, Daddy, that doesn’t mean you’re through,” she objected. Maxwell Evarts Perkins was unknown to the general public, but to people in the world of books he was a major figure, a kind of hero. Several of McCormick’s students had confessed to him that it was the brilliant example of Perkins that had attracted them to publishing.He was 61 years old, stood five feet ten inches, and weighed 150 pounds. He creates nothing.” Perkins admitted that he had suggested books to authors who had no ideas of their own at the moment, but he maintained that such works were usually below their best, even though they were sometimes financially and even critically successful. This is a fabulous biography of a truly admirable man and editor and a wonderful period in American letters (lots of great anecdotes about Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe). His literary judgement was original and exceedingly astute, and he was famous for his ability to inspire an author to produce the best that was in him or her.
But Maxwell Perkins remained a mystery, a backstage presence who served these authors not only as editor but also as critic, career manager, moneylender, psychoanalyst, father-confessor, and friend. Sometimes he needed extra support—and sobering up—but the writing was so rich it was worth it.” Perkins went on to say that Fitzgerald was comparatively simple to edit because he was a perfectionist about his work and wanted it to be right.
For one thing, he had become somewhat deaf and tended to avoid groups.
Maxwell Perkins is an actor, known for Ascension (2016) and Otis Walks Into the Woods (2016). “Max seemed to be going into a private world of his own thoughts,” McCormick said years later, “making interior, private associations, as though he had entered a little room and closed the door behind him.” All in all it was a memorable performance, and the class sat mesmerized. A pinkish glow suffused Perkins’s long, narrow face, softening the prominences.
Don’t ever get to feeling important about yourself, because an editor at most releases energy. Or perhaps Perkins sensed how much fatigue and sorrow had subtracted from his own longevity and felt he had better pass along what he knew before it was too late.“But did Wolfe take your suggestions gracefully?” someone asked.Shortly after six o’clock on a rainy March evening in 1946, a slender, gray-haired man sat in his favorite bar, the Ritz, finishing the last of several martinis. He was one of the nine children in the family.