Dear Readers,
I had a visit the other day with a new doctor. He asked what I do for a living. When I told him I work as an editor, he paused, as if thinking that over. I added, apologetically: “Terribly sedentary. Sitting in a chair all day, staring at a computer.” But he wasn’t musing about the health effects. “When I think of an editor,” he said, “I imagine someone at a desk smoking a pipe.”
This doctor didn’t seem old—probably in his late thirties. What would have put that image in his head? It’s hard to think of representations of The Editor in popular culture. Ed Asner as Lou Grant? Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee? Meryl Streep as Anna Wintour? I can see them smoking cigars, cigarettes. Who’s smoking a pipe? And why would a youngish man have such a dated (masculine) idea of what an editor would look like? Most of the best editors I’ve worked with in recent years have been women—and not a single one a pipe-smoker.
There was a time in the 1940s when the most famous editor in America was Maxwell Perkins, a book editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. He was legendary in the literary world through the 1920s and 1930s because he shaped the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. When Malcolm Cowley wrote a two-part profile of Perkins for The New Yorker in 1944, the fame spread outward: Perkins was besieged by aspiring writers, each hoping to become his next discovery.
I’m thinking of Perkins because I just finished A. Scott Berg’s biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, published in 1978. Berg worked seven years on the book, and it’s a truly impressive accomplishment—a National Book Award winner, kaleidoscopic in its detail, absorbing from start to finish. Usually the work of an editor is invisible to the world—not to mention undramatic—but Berg recognized from the moment he wrote his thesis at Princeton about Perkins what a colorful story there was to tell: the early success of Fitzgerald, followed by his heavy drinking and what he called “the crack-up”; the swagger and ego and fame of Hemingway; and the impossibility of Thomas Wolfe, who found a father-figure in Perkins and brought his manuscript pages in boxes as big as apple crates. Here’s a random scene from the 1930s, by which time Wolfe had already written Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River; still, he was full of starts and stops and chronic self-doubt:
Tom had, in his own words, “begun to go again like a locomotive.” At three o’clock one morning that spring, when Wolfe was living near the Perkinses, another of Max’s neighbors, his author Nancy Hale, heard a monotonous singsong, which grew louder. She got up from bed and looked out the window of her apartment, which was on East Forty-ninth Street near Third Avenue. There was Thomas Wolfe, wearing a black slouch hat, advancing in his long mountaineer’s stride, with his billowing black raincoat, chanting, “I wrote ten thousand words today—I wrote ten thousand words today.”
The book is full of quotidian detail and anecdotes like this—and the reason is that Berg was able to mine a vast trove of correspondence. In his acknowledgments, he says he relied on interviews with those who knew Perkins (including his five daughters), on the archives of manuscripts at Scribners, and on “tens of thousands of letters Perkins wrote and received.” Indeed, it is striking how much time writers and editors spent in those days composing and sending letters. For writers, it was sometimes a warm-up exercise, or a means of procrastination. For Perkins, it was a large part of his job, a way to bolster the flagging confidence of a novelist, to gently suggest necessary revisions, or to share literary news and gossip.
There was also a lot of workshopping of titles. When F. Scott Fitzgerald was working on his first novel, he was calling it The Romantic Egotist. As he revised it, he changed the title to The Education of a Personage. By the time it was published it was This Side of Paradise. His second novel had the working title The Flight of the Rocket; it was published as The Beautiful and the Damned. Then he started work on his third, which he called Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires. At a late stage, he decided to call it Trimalchio in West Egg. But he still had doubts; maybe just Trimalchio. Perkins told him, “I always thought that The Great Gasby was a suggestive and effective title.” Fitzgerald suggested going with just Gatsby. A month before the book’s publication in April of 1925, Fitzgerald wired to say he was “crazy about the title Under the Red White and Blue.” Finally Perkins prevailed and it was published as The Great Gatsby.
All the discarded titles now sound ridiculous. But great titles have a way of making anything else seem impossible. The author William Least Heat Moon struck gold with his best-selling travel memoir in 1982 called Blue Highways. But he admits that one of his working titles was The Wind is Also a Rover. Ouch.
As improbable as it might seem that a biography of an editor could make for good reading, imagine trying to make a movie out of it. Reader, I am here to inform you they tried it. I’ve only just learned this, but Hollywood made A. Scott Berg’s biography of Max Perkins into a 2016 movie called Genius. Having seen a preview, I am certain I could not tolerate it. Colin Firth starring as Max Perkins is probably fine. But the movie apparently focuses primarily on the tumultuous relationship between Perkins and Thomas Wolfe, and they hired Jude Law to portray Wolfe, an absurd miscasting. Wolfe was a six-foot-six North Carolinian. Jude Law is a five-foot-ten Englishman. I will not sit through an hour and forty-four minutes of a half-pint Brit attempting a North Carolina accent. No, no, no.
I see that Hollywood insiders in 2012 originally reported German-Irish actor Michael Fassbender (six-foot tall) would be cast as Wolfe. But if you look at photos of Wolfe, you can’t help but see who the obvious choice would have been: there’s a strong resemblance between Wolfe and Tim Robbins, who happens to be six-foot-five. Robbins was born in California, but you know he could do the accent. What a missed opportunity!
When I went online to see who people consider to be the most famous of editors (Perkins,1 Harold Ross,2 William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, Gordon Lish...) I landed on the work of a blogger for an antiquarian bookselling site who, I swear to god, produced this gem:
Famed Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov famously called editors ‘pompous avuncular brutes’, no doubt because many editors would have urged him to add a coma before ‘avuncular’.
Yes, he actually wrote “coma,” and there was no editor there to save him. And the mistake sits there today. Nobody cares. The author’s bio (is this even a real person?) notes that he “puts his English degree to good use turning words into magic.”
Hemingway is said to have favored machines made by L.C. Smith & Corona Typewriters, Inc. That company was founded in 1886 by Lyman Smith and his brothers Wilbert, Hurlburt, and Monroe, in Syracuse, New York. Around 1910, according to a New York historian, about half the typewriters in America were being manufactured in Syracuse. In the 1920s, Smith and Brothers merged with the Corona Typewriter company. They manufactured their last manual typewriter around 1970.
There’s a philosophy professor at Xavier University who maintains an extensive site devoted to old typewriters. (It’s hosted by Xavier.) I was able to find an owner’s manual (his collection of them is huge!) for the “Floating Shift”3 model of Smith-Corona. Printed in 1949, it concludes with this advice:
“It is well to have your machine cleaned and oiled at least once a year by some competent service station. The manufacturers will be glad to furnish you with the name and address of the nearest competent service station in your locality.”
When I lived in Arlington, Mass., I was fortunate to have a most competent service station: it was a little shop called Cambridge Typewriter Co., run by Tom Furrier. It’s still going strong, repairing machines, reconditioning others and offering them for sale. For several years, Tom was keeping up a blog, often with entries typed and posted. You can read it here, and can keep up with the news from his shop on Instagram. He is part of a vast subculture of typewriter appreciators out there. You can find them, as they find each other, on the internet.
Perkins died in 1947 at age 62.
Ross, the famous New Yorker editor, died in 1951 at age 59.
The “Floating Shift” innovation raised the whole set of typewriter bars to make capital letters, as opposed to raising the platen, or cylinder itself.