The Peripatetic Reviewer

A good editor is half critic, half writer; he should have the ability to detect the strength as well as the weakness in any manuscript, and to help enlarge that strength when need be. Finally, and most important of all, a good editor is instinctive: he has the instinctive ability to put himself in the author’s place, and the creative power — not as much as the author’s, of course, but enough — to help project that vision of the book the author has seen in his mind.

This instinct was highly developed in Maxwell E. Perkins, who was for thirty-seven years an editor of Charles Scribner’s Sons and for the last fifteen its editor-in-chief. Max Perkins was, as his associate, John Hall Wheelock, fairly says, the most creative editor of his time,” and to read his perceptive, warmhearted, and painstaking Editor to Author (Scribner’s, $3.75) is to realize why a good editor in the heat of his occupation seldom has time to write anything but letters, He has given the full strength of his imagination to the kindling of other people’s books.

Like all great editors, Max never had enough of his work. He got to the office at nine in the morning or earlier, worked a long day, and avoided like death the literary cocktail parties whose leaden after-effects would have ruined his evening’s reading. No week-end was ever long enough for the manuscripts he took home in his brief case. He begrudged himself a ten-day vacation, and couldn’t understand why his sorretary or anyone else in the wanted more. Once, after a particularly hard spot of work, he allowed himself to be tempted down to Key West by Ernest Hemingway. The first day, Hemingway took him out on the water and Max caught a fish. That evening they sat together drinking and talking over books and the manuscripts to come, but it was only a matter of days before Max was homesick for his work, and back he came two weeks before any associate expected him.

I remember Max in his office. It was a plain little room high up on the corner of 48th Street with the current of Fifth Avenue surging below. Max, a small, neat figure, with taffy coloring and a quiet voice, worked with a bare desk. There might be a pad on it and a few penciled notes — no more. He worked with his hat on, a brown felt hat which must have changed through the years but which always looked the same. Every editor has to cope with a certain number of wound-up visitors, and rumor had it that Max wore his hat to give these long talkers the impression he was about to leave for an appoint - ment. But time was something he never begrudged to those he believed in.

Since few readers ever identify the publishers of their favorite books, let me enumerate some of the talented writers whom Max attracted and helped to develop under the Scribner imprint. He discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald; he found Ring Lardner in journalism, and brought Eardner s stories together in book form; he recognized the enormous potential of Thomas Wolfe alter Tom’s first novel had been declined by several publishers, and to the editing of Look Homeward, Angel, and Of Time and the River, he devoted the hardest hours of his career; he coaxed and braced Marjorie Kmnan Raw lings to write The Yearling when others were after her for a more commercial novel. With his love of American histoiy he brought knowledgeable help to the historical novels of James Boyd: to the picturesque books of John W. Thomason, Jr., the gifted Marine, and Will James, the cowboy, as to the historical sequence by Marcia Haven port. He edited Erskine Caldwell, tin’ mysteries of S. S. Van Dine, and every big novel by Ernest Hemingway. No other American editor could match this list for its talent and its diversity.

The letters which have been gathered together in Editor to Author show the diversity; they show Max Perkins’s magnetic capacity for appreciation, the devotion to detail, the wise and listening sympathy, and the shy Yankee diffidence with which Max made his constructive suggestions. The letters have that absorbing, intimate, revealing quality which is the hallmark of every great letter writer. Whether he is counseling a young novelist or advising an elder on his autobiography, or breaking the truth of slow sales to as touchy a subject as John Galsworthy, his words are direct, masculine, and considerate. And above all — this is the point I hope readers (and younger editors) will bear in mind — he was never didactic; he gave his criticism and his suggestions in such a tentative way that the author never felt that he was being censored or his authority challenged.

“Do not ever defer to my judgment,” he wrote to Scott Fitzgerald. “You won’t on any vital point, I know, and I should be ashamed, if it were possible to have made you. . .”Yet later, when they were going over the manuscript of Fitzgerald’s best book, The Great Gatsby, it was Max who put his finger on the unnatural mysteriousness which surrounded Gatsby, and with his criticism helped to clear the fog away.

To Edward Bok, who was finishing the last volume of his autobiography, he wrote: “I think your books as a whole run the danger of giving t he impression that you overvalue material success. This book does not, perhaps, as it stands; but, at the same time. . . .” And again he was probing for ways to correct that impression. To James Boyd, who had just finished the manuscript of that fine Revolutionary novel, Drums, Max wrote: “In all my comments, my idea is not so much that there are deficiencies, but that you have abilities that might get fuller play.” And to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings he gave this advice: “The sales department always want a novel. They want to turn everything into a novel. They would have turned the New Testament into one, if il had come to us for publication, and they could have. But I am right about it, and a book about a boy and the life of the scrub is the thing we want. Anyhow, the thing for you to do is to write it as you feel it and want it, without regard to anybody at all. It is those wonderful river trips, and the hunting, and the dogs and guns, and the companionship of simple people who care about the same things which were included in ‘South Moon Under’ that we are thinking about. It is all simple, not complicated —don’t let anything make it complicated to you.”

The eagle guard with which Max defected the soft spots in any manuscript, and the imagination with which he helped to sustain the best work of his authors, naturally attracted to him many, many aspirants. His letters of rejection are a remarkable blend of firmness and humility, particularly that, letter written toward the close of his life to the enraged writer who felt that Scribner’s was depriving her of her right to give the world a message — the letter in which he says: “You ask who I am, and I may as well answer you and have an end to it. I am, or at least should be if I fulfilled myself, John Smith, U.S.A. He is the man who doesn’t know much, nor think that he knows much. He starts out with certain ambitions but he gradually accumulates obligations as he goes along. . . .” That, I think, is one of the greatest letters Max ever wrote.

The friendship which grows out of the authoreditor relationship sometimes develops a dependency. There are dangers in this, as Max well knew, and in his diffident way he tried to avoid them, but they could not be avoided in the case of Tom Wolfe. Wolfe’s first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, called for an immense amount of editing. I doubt if the book would have been published without, the work Perkins put into it. A more difficult problem presented itself in Wolfe’s still larger novel, Of Time and the River. When the manuscript was in its next to final stage, the author felt impelled to inject throughout a Marxian philosophy which had not been in his thoughts when he first conceived and wrote the story and which in Perkins’s judgment was foreign to the character of the book. Perkins, who had many books on the fire in this particular year, was giving Wolfe two hours every night while this controversy raged, and for long periods they would sit in silence glowering at the manuscript and occasionally at each other. Finally Wolfe said, “Well, then will you take the responsibility?” Perkins replied, “I have simply got to take the responsibility. And what’s more,” he added, “I will be blamed either way. And he was. For although Wolfe dedicated this novel to his editor in words which still glow, it. was the last of his to appear under the Scribner imprint. He took his next novel to Harper’s, where, I may add, it received just as toilsome a going over.

There are many other literary controversies which are met with courage in these letters. We see how Max stood up to the onslaught of the Christian Scientists at the time Scribner’s published its new biography of Mary Baker Eddy. We see his remarkable letters on the freedom of expression, as when he defends the “realism” of novelists such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. We see his concern for libel and authors’ debts. We see him deal with writers as far apart as Trotsky and Arthur Train. We are grateful to his fellow editor, John Hall Wheelock, who selected and mounted these letters about which I have only one small regret. I think Max would have liked us to see a few of his mistakes. For no editor is infallible.

The Boys from Sharon by Louise Field Cooper (Harper, $2.75) is an ingratiating short novel which puts me in mind of a somewhat more mature version of Helen’s Babies. To a loveless, pompous old mansion in Sharon, Connecticut, come the two young Invaders — George, aged eight, the adventurous one, and Lucius, aged twelve, his more discriminating brother. They have been taken in for a week’s visit while their parents are in Bermuda, and the fun of the thing is to see what they do to the house and its inmates.

The Invaded consist of Mrs. Fanning, “a narrow, cylindrical, upright figure with an unsleeping civic conscience.”As her niece says, “She never wanted to have children. . . . She’s just the mother of committees, that s what she is.”The second of the household is Mr. Forrest Howe, an old cabbage who has vegetated so long on his sister’s money that he no longer has any desire but to eat and sleep. And third is his tall, not bad-looking daughter Edith, who is hungry for love, who has no job, and whose self-defense and loneliness are fast building her into a shell. The household is run with all the lugubrious Victorian solemnity which money and maids can afford, and not until the boys arrive and let in, along with the fresh air, a certain black-visored instructor from the near-by university does Edith have any chance of escape.

The boys are as a woman imagined them, sensitive and capricious, rather than boisterous. Anna, the Swedish maid, is a comedian with a lovely accent, and the two overstuffed elders are, as they were intended to be, the targets of some of Miss Cooper’s nicest irony. Very pleasant, nicely phrased, and light.

Having made friends and irritants by his country cousin chronicle, The Proper Bostonians,Cleveland Amory now comes up with a satirical scrutiny of the promotion racket as it flourishes among publishers in New York City. Home Town (Harper, f$3.00) is the story built, around Mitchell Hickok (no relation to Wild Bill, as he keeps protesting), who has pasted together a book from his columns in the Fairfax, Arizona, Flyer, and who has been brought on to New York for promotion by his publishers, Hathaway House.

The novel gets off to a slow start chiefly because Bill Devereux, the publicity man for Hathaway, is such a caricature that not until he gets out of the spot Light does the action come to life. But the moment Mitch walks onto the stage all is well. Mitch Hickok is a natural. Gin, his New York girl, says of him, “Darling, you fool everybody. . . . You don’t look as if you even know where you’re going but you always land on your feet.” Mitch is six feet three, rather unprepossessing, with glasses, but he has an unsurpassed vocabulary of Western idiom, an unspoiled appetite for New York, and an unusually honest reaction to the razzle-dazzle of cocktail parties, radio interview’s, women’s clubs, television, and blondes with bombsight hair. Mr. Amory was Managing Editor of an evening paper in Arizona, and later the author of a provocative book: both halves of this experience contribute to the refreshing satire in this, his first novel.