Anonymous Hero

By Paul Gray

MAX PERKINS: EDITOR OF GENIUS by A. Scott Berg Dutton; 498 pages; $15

Whatever his accomplishments as a gifted literary editor, Maxwell Perkins made life hard for would-be biographers. He was a taciturn and thoroughly decent man who absolutely refused to act out the sort of emotional highs and lows that drive a narrative along. By choice, he did exactly the same thing every working day for 32 years: he sat in the New York City offices of Charles Scribner's Sons and nurtured the talents of others. Because three of those were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, all of whom put their private lives in open books, Perkins' reputation as a remarkable editor passed beyond publishing circles and made him modestly famous. He did not like it. "An editor," he said repeatedly, "should strive for anonymity."

Biographer A. Scott Berg, who began this project as a Princeton senior thesis eight years ago, thus had to struggle with his subject, trying to make a hero out of a man who always fancied himself a spear carrier. In preparation, Berg sifted through Perkins' massive correspondence, including an unsuspected cache of platonic and rather wistful love letters to a younger woman, and interviewed everyone he could find who had a Perkins anecdote to tell. The result is a draw. Perkins emerges as both anonymous and heroic.

The facts of Perkins' life are plain to the point of austerity. The offspring of two old New England families, Perkins had a genteel suburban childhood in New Jersey, spent four years at Harvard, tried newspaper reporting for a while and then joined Scribner's. He married and fathered five daughters. His eccentricities were notable chiefly because of their rarity. He liked to wear a hat in the office, pulled down so that his ears stuck forward. He doodled pictures that were ostensibly of Napoleon; around the prominent eyes and the high-bridged nose, they looked like self-portraits. And that was it. Colorful and bizarre living he left to his friends. In that regard, Scott and Zelda, Ernest, Tom and the rest rarely let him down.

Berg includes far too many familiar anecdotes about the depressions and binges of Perkins' famous authors. A law should be passed, in particular, banning any retelling of the booze-soaked Fitzgerald legend for at least 30 years. But it is easy to see why Berg had to fall back on these dog-eared tales. The dramas in Perkins' life occurred in solitude. The thing that distinguished this editor from thousands and thousands of other industrious office workers was a private, inaccessible gift. He could read a manuscript and see the book that the author had hoped to write; then he could help him get there. Secondhand creativity is not glamorous, but with it Maxwell Perkins changed the history of American letters.

In the beginning, he championed Fitzgerald when the young author's work was considered too daring to print. Near the close of his life, the editor nudged James Jones down the thin red line that led to From Here to Eternity. Once he sensed the presence of talent, Perkins thought no burden too great if it would help an author produce a worthy novel. While suggesting possible improvements to one writer, he spun out a letter 30 pages long. He managed finances, patched up family troubles, soothed egos and never complained about the demands made on his patience and energy. The strain hastened his death, at 62, in 1947.

It is a pity that Perkins could not see the manuscript of his biography. He enjoyed finding promising young writers, and Berg, 28, is one of that small group. He might have indicated some cutting that the book as published could use. And although he would have been embarrassed by the attention, Berg's tribute would have touched him.

--Paul Gray

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