A. Scott Berg Saves Max Perkins from Anonymity (original) (raw)

A. Scott Berg has almost single-handedly rescued Maxwell Perkins from the anonymity he desired. Berg’s 1978 biography, “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius,” 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. The glamour of these figures prompted a Hollywood studio to option the book. Then, Berg recalled hearing, “the head of Universal got to page 3 of the script and said, ‘This is about a book editor?’ ”

Thirty-eight years later, “Genius”—which makes Perkins an action hero who wields his red pencil like a scimitar—has just opened, at last. The other morning, Berg, now sixty-six, stood in front of Perkins’s old town house, in Turtle Bay. The writer was garden-party-ready, in pressed khakis, a pink shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and a striped magenta tie, with a blazer draped over his shoulders. In 1936, he said, 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!’ ”

As Berg retraced Perkins’s ten-minute walk to his office at Charles Scribner’s Sons, he pointed out the site of Manny Wolf’s Chophouse, where Perkins and Thomas Wolfe would dine. The film centers on the father-son relationship between Perkins, who had five daughters, and Wolfe, who yearned for a muse. Berg said that Colin Firth’s portrayal of Perkins as a repressed mensch was “beyond apt. I’d suggested he look at footage of the Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was Perkins’s nephew, for the family voice, which was sandy-throated and precise.” He added that Jude Law’s take on Wolfe as a verbose man-child was also accurate: “I found a letter from Wolfe to Max in which he said, ‘Generally, I do not believe the writing to be wordy, prolix, or redundant’—and I thought, Oh, yes, it is!”

Swinging a tote bag as he walked west, 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.”

At Forty-eighth and Fifth, Berg said, “And here we have the famous Scribner’s bookstore, now a Sephora.” Next door, he rode the elevator to the fifth floor, where Perkins had the corner office. “When Perkins first arrived, the Scribner’s office still felt Dickensian,” he said. “When I arrived—they set me up with a little desk and a typewriter, so I could take notes from the archive—there weren’t men perched on stools over high desks, but it hadn’t advanced much.”

He stepped into an empty loft. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I am utterly disoriented.” He looked up at the H.V.A.C. snakework: “There was nothing exposed here, either architecturally or emotionally.” He pressed his nose to the mullioned windows, all that remained. “I’m trying to dope it out. Max’s office must have been over here, but how . . .” Positioning himself by the elevator, Berg paced the points of the compass, muttering and scratching his head. “I feel like I’m in a dream,” he said. He asked a man who was working in the back about the old dispensation. “I don’t know anything about that,” the man said. “But it’s going to be a showroom for furniture refinishes.” ♦