Max Perkins

...Later, she converted to The editor's editor Catholicism, and attempted ceaselessly to convert Perkins, who sometimes came ma PEHUDIU: wealthy and philanthropic Boston home from work to find his parlor filled merchant who became America's first art with priests and nuns...

...All this laced with plenty writers, to enshrine art for us, have got19 16 February 1979: 93...

...By midplace transience by transcendence...

...Later, he More...

...editor's editor...

...I sym- boy's con to another establishment scam, best-sellers, but filmable ones...

...Wolfe's emotionalism was gar- ten to do so because their privilege afkins's gift for identifying talented writers gantuan, and endless scenes were played fords them this privilege...

...Commonweal: 92 appear in the book...

...He went to work as REVIEWERS WILLIAM V. SHANNON, formerly of the New a cub reporter for the New York Times, York Times and political correspondent for BECOME A 1979 and two years later was hired as advertis- Commonweal, is presently United States Aming manager for Scribners...

...Charter Member: surrounded by women...

...They were Berg has actually written four biogGenius clearly fills this need,and, qualities that helped to make Perkins the raphies in one, giving extended attention moreover, is a hugely informative work...

...and Berg reveals Per- Street...

...I can't...

...won't be hit over the head with and may Mario Puzo started his career trying to Marco Puzo even find interesting...

...Monet fancied himself a bear now...

...manuscripts, with one leg sometimes FATHER JOHN L. McKENZIE is the author of New York, N.Y...

...I'm more conwithout as yet seeing anything they had tween Wolfe and his cast-off but still cerned that it's bad Puzo...

...One finishes the biography punishing their missteps with death...

...10016 raised up against the other, giving him The Old Testament Without Illusion (Thomas the appearance of a stork...

...Puzo's role in have spacious prominence in the work, writer...

...100 or more had a lectern-desk installed in his office, JOHN DRUSKA is a writer who currently Commonweal Assodates before which he stood working over teaches high school in Indianapolis...

...They might rap (sometimes merely by meeting them, out, involving Perkins in a crossfire be- Fools Die as a bad novel...

...Wolfe parison with the more commercialized level his actors for him and punctuate his invaded not only Perkins's office at world of publishing today, that Perkins novel much as it does the TV news, Puzo Scribners, but also his home on East 49th was a man of towering integrity...

...COMMONWEAL when he was moved up to the editorial HENRY WARNER BOWDEN is associate prooffices, he had married Louise Saunders, fessor of Religion at Douglass College, RutASSOCIATE and they had the first three of their five gers University, in New Jersey...

...literary world...

...Their relationship, however, was qualities were incorporated into the purely platonic, for there was far too M AxwELL Perkins was a legend in his character of Perkins himself...

...If his above quote from the surviving kernel of middle-classifying of the novelist's art Ill HAVE written three novels," Mario a late great novelist's unfinished master- has been admirable in light of his turning Puzo said in The Godfather Pa- piece, which Puzo invents to instigate the Wasp-spun American dreams to an pers...

...But it is publishing has an editor given so much of print fades on some pages and, in the case Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe who himself for a gifted but chaotic young of odd letters, vanishes...

...crash the top floors of literary fame...

...began to fill the room, he never noticed, embarking on a series of newly daring There is an everlasting going down and continued with his work...

...deeply, and after Wolfe's death in 1938, lcrs he portrays as "degenerate Quite a bit of the anecdotal material Perkins seemed to lose interest in life, gamblers...

...I understand Puzo PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY Die roughly sketches the interlocked his- more than I do some of the critics who've Priucuton, New Jersey 05540 tories of honchos in several familiar Puzo panned this book because of its trash ap- Princeton Theological Seminary admits worlds: "`the poor struggling genius peal...

...If the Evarts were the embod- Elizabeth Lemmon, an attractive woman Dutton, $15, 498 pp...

...reaching receptiveness to imaginative forms only a portion of the book, for A. Scott Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of writing that is bold and living...

...and Taylor Caldwell...

...he Putnam, $12.50, 572 PP...

...more, through his perpetuation of publishers-a notion "that (they) cared I admire Mario Puzo's perceptions of American pulp...

...Anyone much starch in Perkins's nature for him own time, and eventually passed who has read the published letters of Per- to enter into an affair with her...

...I share his feelings that a lot of those indents of any race, color and national or world, the crooked world and the classy who've been set up to pass judgment on ethnic origin end without regard to sex or handicap...

...He unsympathetic to her ambitions...

...Yet until now no Yankee probity, together with an out- Perkins's personal history, however, biography has been written about him...

...The prose throughout sounds as uni- seems stuck now going around in that old formly infelicitous, as profoundly super- revolving door of success, which leads to John Brushs ficial and pretentiously didactic, as the literature's bargain basement...

...him up and out of the near-death of death, but he was not afraid to paint the worked in his office with his hat on, and paralysis...

...should have developed and stressed more dle age, she felt the resentment of a Monet feared the dark, which suggested strongly the meaning of such strategy...

...woman who has been deprived of a life of her own, and the tensions between the two increased...

...ethnic-outcast's uses, his demoralizing the preceding two...

...And just in case Hollywood doesn't pick up an option on this Poor boy makes bad book, he's stacked it with subplots enough to stake some needy TV network FOOLS DIE of sex, some complicated ideas you to at least a lucrative mini-series...

...The Godfather is not as good as telling of his hero Merlyn's adventures...

...There were to be no sons, and RICHARD L. SCHOENWALD teaches in the Department of History at Carnegie-Mellon $50 Perkins was to live, at times reluctantly, University in Pittsburgh...

...And learn the real thins to popular wisdom by penning a novel his bravado -in concocting Fools Die- BIBLICAL GREEK AND HEBREW he'd probably be the first to rank below the stunts he pulls to support a structure SUMMER LANGUAGE PROGRAM The Godfather...

...written), helping them to see the struc- hysterically clinging lover Aline Berns- Putnam's "First Impression" of Fools ture and form for their work, and making tein...

...By 1914, bassador to Ireland...

...Many of Perkins's his forebears including William Maxwell far from being well off...

...It's paid pathize with his poor boy's sense of the off so handsomely that Puzo has con- unprivileged writer's struggle in com- Why toy with translations, when you con tinued his walk along the downward path mercialized and stratified America...

...canvases that became "The Stations of into death, crueler and more difficult to Perkins's marriage was not entirely the Cross...

...iment of public service and personal dis- belonging to a wealthy Virginia family, cipline, the Perkinses represented a spirit with whom Perkins corresponded for Robert Emmet Long of aestheticism, and these two different years...

...Maxwell Evarts Perkins was de- As Berg explains, when Perkins Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, scended from old New England families, graduated from Harvard in 1907, he was and Thomas Wolfe...

...Puzo's talents and conabout art" -and to capitalize on the bus- ethnic life (see The Fortunate Pilgrim science, reducing a calculated pooriness of writing not only publishable and The Godfather Papers...

...At a into fiction as Foxhall Edwards in kins will recognize the character of the restaurant, he reached out his hand to her Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home man, the sense they give of a spare, without quite touching her, and said, Again, and in novels by Hamilton Basso measured, and somewhat conservative "Elizabeth...

...tricks (stolen from classical tragedy and appear living and real, with the charm In Berg's biography, Perkins is often diluted through melodrama) of entrapand vulnerability that fascinated other eclipsed by the authors he devotedly ping most of his characters in their foibiographers...

...His father died in other authors (some with famous names) Evarts, United States Senator and Secre- his mid forties, and his estate was small, tary of State under President Hayes, and so that Perkins's assets were chiefly his Charles Callaghan Perkins, son of a Yankee "character...

...As it is the section dealing with Wolfe, who with the impression, particularly in com- he lets death, with gratuitous regularity, became the son Perkins never had...

...Langer observes a few times happy...

...levels the practice of his craft and art to arch craftiness...

...Perhaps nowhere in the history of Die appears a shoddy offset job whose them share his belief in them...

...But since the latter (That departure in spelling from the performance of his art today is reprehennetted him just $3500 and $3000, he was hero's magical namesake is about the ex- sible to the extent that it claims more and moved to- overcome his naivete about tent of symbolic subtlety here...

...play of light on his dead wife's face, was so oblivious of everything except The painter Barnett Newman, warned though he felt shocked when he caught what he was reading that when a fire by a heart attack, attached himself to himself acting his usual role, the prac- started in his wastebasket, and smoke universal mortality and immortality by titioner of art...

...232 Madison Ave...

...There was also EDITOR OF GENIUS critic, writing major studies of European another woman in Perkins's life, A. Scott Berg sculpture...

...Ironically, however, it was compiling this package marks him a deand who most often engage the reader's through Wolfe that Perkins lived most generate novelist akin to those Vegas rolinterest...

...to three of his most famous authors-F...

...on the immense scale he's conceived- June 4 - July 27 Awkwardly narrated from multiple, reveals at least shadows of a real randomly juggled points-of-view, Fools novelist's daring...

...Louise Perkins worked in secularist, yet early critical response to that the making of art, the writing of the amateur theater, and had aspirations of his series of poplars in ever changing light books he discusses, represents a step be- becoming an actress, but Perkins was found in them precisely an effort to re- yond mere immersion in atrocity...

...As an editor, he ROBERT EMMET LONG has recently comdisplayed a number of eccentricities...

...Sustaining Member: daughters...

...To direct his picaresque acdealing with Fitzgerald and Hemingway withdrawing more and more into his tions toward some semblance of an endseems hoary with age, and there are few work, and dying in 1947 of pneumonia, ing Puzo resorts to the old Hollywood new revelations about them, and yet they but actually of overwork and exhaustion...

...He pleted a book on Henry James...

...To the extent that there is an served, but the essence of Maxwell Per- bles and/or the accidents of fortune, and emotional center in a work so objective, kins is felt...