September 20, 1884

A New Yorker article about A. Scott Berg's book on Maxwell Perkins (September 20, 1884 to June 17, 1947) sets the arena for this article, with these vignettes:

.... “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius,”[1978] was a masterly look at a reticent Yankee who buried himself in manuscripts, wore a fedora everywhere, and deplored innovations—even as he discovered and published Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe. ....

..... Berg ... [said regarding] Perkins’s old town house, in Turtle Bay. .....[that] In 1936,...Perkins’s wife painted the limestone exterior black, “and when people asked Max what that was all about, he said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s because Roosevelt got reëlected.’ ” Berg later became close with Perkins’s next-door neighbor Katharine Hepburn, and wrote a book about her, too. “They never spoke,” he said, “but Perkins would stare over at a bust of Hepburn on her second floor. It used to kill him: What kind of woman has a bust of herself? I mentioned that to her, and she said, ‘That’s why he led a quiet life of books and I’m an actress!’ ”

......Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, ...was Perkins’s nephew,....

......Berg said that when Wolfe wrote a book that detailed how Perkins had hewn his novels from dense forests of Wolfean prose, “Perkins begged him, in vain, not to publish it. Max always said that if editors were too well known the public would lose faith in writers, and that, above all, writers would lose faith in themselves. And that is exactly what happened to Thomas Wolfe.”

And with these vignettes, we are grateful to Berg for rescuing this detail:

"Lady writers expect you to do many things for them apart from their books," Perkins wrote Professor Copeland in the early forties...."Another woman called Max up in tears to say,"My cat, John Keats, is dying." Perkins offered only sympathy. She said, "You must send a veterinary." He replied he did not know much about animal doctors and asked if she couldn't get one in her neighborhood. "But I haven't any money," she whimpered. "Will you pay for it?" In order to get her back to work, he did.