Literary Midwife

EDITOR TO AUTHOR: THE LETTERS OF MAXWELL E. PERKINS (31 5 pp.) --Edited by John Hall Wheelock--Scribner ($3.75).

The public seldom hears of publishing-house editors any more, and there is little reason why it should. With a big part of the book trade bustling to confect bestsellers, the editor has tended to turn into a chef.

There are still a few book editors old-fashioned enough to care chiefly for good books, but in an industry increasingly geared to "the big pitch" they are a thin remnant. One of the best of them, Maxwell Perkins, died three years ago after a legendary 37-year career with Scribner in which he discovered or helped push to fame such men as Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Marquand and Thomas Wolfe.

A Grain of Help. A modest and intense New Englander, Max Perkins had a modest notion of his job. "Editors," he wrote, "aren't much, and can't be. They can only hlelp a writer realize himself, and they can ruin him if he's pliable . . ." Perkins thought of himself as a literary midwife who helped a writer through the painful labor of creation (mainly by holding his hand), but never tried to shape the nature of his offspring. "Don't ever defer to my judgment," he wrote to Scott Fitzgerald in one of the letters collected in this book.

Perkins was ready to send his writers long letters with shrewd and specific suggestions for improving their manuscripts, but he realized that a main function was to prop their drooping egos while they worked. To Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings he wrote, "I can understand your feeling anxious, because a good writer always does, and ought to." Perkins became father confessor, literary adviser, financial agent and friend to his struggling writers. He negotiated with Tom Wolfe's dunning creditors while Wolfe was in Europe, he gentled Sherwood Anderson when Anderson was on his last literary legs, and he reassured a nervous Hemingway who hovered over his shoulder as Perkins read the last third of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

On the prim side himself. Perkins bravely went to bat for his outspoken writers. Sometimes this got him into half-ridiculous situations. When he told steely old Charles Scribner II that there were only three really offensive words in one Hemingway manuscript, Scribner crisply asked which they were. Perkins could not bring himself to say; he had to write them out on a pad.

A Grain of Dust. Though the father of five daughters, Perkins became a mild misogynist in his dealings with fussy "lady writers" and used to complain wryly of their demands. One of them, whose anonymity he carefully preserved, telephoned him once to say that her cat John Keats was dying and could Perkins get a veterinarian? Another lady author of a book on. Swedish massage horrified him by asking him "just to feel of the muscles of my abdomen."

But such trials were minor compared to Perkins' greatest literary experience: editing Thomas Wolfe. He gave much of his time and all of his skill and affection to help shape the young writer's thousands of wild pages into coherent books. Night after night he would talk to him "to make him think he is some good again." In a letter to Hemingway, Perkins described one scene after he had urged Wolfe to make a necessary cut: "We sat there for an hour . . . glowered and without saying pondered a and word, fidgeted while ..." Tom When Wolfe became famous, he grew uneasy about his dependence on Perkins and turned to another publisher. For Perkins this was a blow, but he never spoke to Wolfe in reproach. From his deathbed Wolfe sent him a letter of penitence in which he wrote, "I know now I'm just a of grain you . of . ." dust ... I shall always think

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