Friday, April 10, 2009

max perkins: portrait of an artist's best friend [book it]

As Stephanie Meyers continues her demoralizing, months-long domination of the bestsellers lists (btw which is not to say that Twilight the movie isn't a joyful cultural landmark of epic, straight-faced campiness -- and the only film I saw twice last year), let us reflect on a more stirring era in book publishing. 
Yes, I'm biased towards the 20s. Fitzgerald and Hemingway may be English dusty class perennials, but I say that status is well-earned. Their two peak creations -- The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, respectively -- are short and bittersweet works of singular soul. Beyond the iconic styles of the authors themselves (and of course I don't ever mean to sell a writer short), the world perhaps truly owes those final products to one Max Perkins, the longtime Scribner's editor who not only signed these and other fledgling literary lions, but shined their work to a fine polish.
A. Scott Berg's well-received 1978 biography of Perkins, the rather hyperbolically titled Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, presents the man as a quiet behind-the-scenes type with a gut feeling for writing talent and an even more impressive patience for shepherding it along. Fitzergald in particular benefitted from Perkins' seemingly infinite benevolence, and not only from extensive page-by-page editing sessions and title recommendations (Gatsby might have otherwise been titled Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires or, oy, Trimalchio in West Egg). Fitzgerald also relied on Perkins to dole out his pay in allowance-like installments, the famously excessive author being perhaps chemically incapable of living within means.
Perkins came from two distinguished two England lines, the Perkins and the Evarts. He had five daughters, a mildly tense marriage, and a deep fondness for the family summer home up in Windsor, VT (a relaxed, good-living state which, I might add, also gives me the warm fuzzies). But my favorite bit of biography concerns his quarter-century correspondence with one Elizabeth Lemmon (another Liz Lemon! Ha. If you don't watch 30 Rock, excuse the interruption), a family acquaintance who ended up serving Perkins in an odd -- and chaste -- confidant capacity. A lovely blonde with a rolling Virginia estate, Elizabeth was a distant, elusive ideal for a man who already harbored a sentimental taste for Venus (a three-foot version of the Venus di Milo stood in his front hall for decades); she was "an oasis of warmth and understanding in an increasingly difficult marriage." The relationship, it seems, did stick to letters, but its existence gives Perkins another shade, as well as underscores the many private connections that people pursue, quietly treasure, and even require. And how appropriate, that a man of letters who shied from the public eye, would conduct his greatest emotional affair with the pen alone. 
I'll leave you with this small Perkins observation, noted in a complaining letter to Lemmon in the midst of a dull Atlantic crossing: "The ocean doesn't even give a sense of immensity because you can clearly see the edge, equally distant in every direction. The ocean is a disc." Perkins was a keenly perceptive man, and it was that fine eye for detail that effectively mediated between his era's literary talent and the masterworks we still revere today. 

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