Word: berge
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dearth of material on Perkins up till now has been a testimonial to the success of his obsessive search for anonymity, and it is fitting that Berg opens his book with an anecedote about it. He tells how Perkins, after arriving home late after giving a speech to a publishing class, finds one of his daughters waiting...
Perkins was a rather conservative fellow of solid Yankee stock, and Berg wisely uses accounts of Max's relations with his writers to tell the story. Berg gives the basics of Max's upbringing and personal life but perceives that these can go only so far toward answering just why he demonstrated such an uncanny ability for spotting and remaining faithful to the young men and women who went on to become some of America's finest writers...
...Berg for example, is clearly ascinated by Perkin's odd relations with women--describing in detail his platonic ove for Elizabeth Lemmon, his stromy marriage, and his fights with Zelda Fitzgerald and Aline Berstein. Thomas Wolfe's lover--but does not attempt to find in them some secret to Perkins' great eye for fine writers. Rather, Berg simply presents his information about Maxwell Perkins the man, and then moves on to describe his relations with his authors and the conservative elite at Charles Scribners Sons...
Above all, Max mistrusted the dry, academic approach to literature. Wolfe, who in You Can't Go Home Again provided the best portrait of Perkins before Berg's book, tells of a conversation Max has with one of his daughters...
Lovers of Hemingway. Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Lardner and company will devour Berg's book if for nothing more than the anecdotes about the writers. Though Berg adds little to the voluminous scholarship on these writers, there emerges from Perkins' letters and trivia a picture of the writers maintained over and over again that they didn't give a damn about what the critics said; but they always listened to Perkins' advice and--as the letters show--followed it closely. Perkins, of course, remained equally loyal to his writers, giving a seemingly limitless supply of encouragement, advice and advance money from...