Max Perkins by A. Scott Berg

Author:A. Scott Berg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

In his piece for the Harvard Library Bulletin Perkins wrote, “It is said that Tolstoi never willingly parted with the manuscript of War and Peace. One could imagine him working on it all through his life.” So it was with Wolfe and Of Time and the River.

“I think I’m peculiarly cursed in almost always knowing what I ought to do,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon. “If you don’t know it’s all right enough; but if you do know and don’t do it, that’s bad.” As a result, he confided, “I’ve taken awful risks about that book, but I had to do it. It had to be done, and because of the peculiar circumstances of the case I almost know that no one else could have done it as well and finished it. You may hear me damned for it some day but I reckoned that in from the start. I’m mentally prepared for it but whether emotionally I don’t know.”

Late that fall, Wolfe resisted Elizabeth Lemmon’s invitations no longer. After Max had spoken so much about each of them to the other, they met in Middleburg. Elizabeth adored Tom. She said, “He was a much more natural person than Fitzgerald. Scott’s inferiority complex made him always the show-off. Tom had a more basic kind of dignity. He was completely honest.” Because of Wolfe’s genuine warmth and interest in everyone around, she was inclined to overlook his occasional vituperation. She showed him around Middleburg one day, and one woman with whom they started talking about literature thoughtlessly dropped the comment that she never remembered the name of the author of any book. Elizabeth remembered that “Tom sulked the rest of the time we were there; but when we left he blew up. ‘W-W-Why did she h-h-have me over if she w-w-wanted to insult me?’ he bellowed.”

After leaving Welbourne, he wrote Elizabeth:Your America is not my America and for that reason I have always loved it even more—there is an enormous age and sadness in Virginia—a grand kind of death ... I’ve got to find my America somehow here in Brooklyn and Manhattan, in all the fog and the swelter of the city, in subways and railway stations, on trains and in the Chicago Stock Yards. I’m so glad you let me see your wonderful place and see a little of the country and the kind of life you have down there.

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