Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

No one could have known Max who did not understand what Windsor, or Vermont in general, meant for him, the deep stake in the old rural America from which the foreground of his life was in many of its elements so far removed,“ Van Wyck Brooks wrote in Scenes and Portraits. Practically all of Perkins’s life was spent in New York City or its suburbs, but the tart values of New England were the essence of his character. He was full of Yankee quirks and biases. He could be crotchety in his behavior and literary taste, obtuse and old-fashioned. And yet, Brooks believed, Windsor and all it stood for had kept him at heart ”so direct, so uninfluenced by prejudice, so unclouded by secondary feelings, so immediate, so fresh.“ Max’s was a New England mind, filled with dichotomies.

He was born on September 20, 1884, in Manhattan, at the corner of Second Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and named William Maxwell Evarts Perkins, thus becoming the nominative heir of two distinguished families. Brooks said he had known “few other Americans in whom so much history was palpably and visibly embodied, so that one saw it working in him, sometimes not too happily, for his mind was always in a state of civil war.”

It was the English battle between Roundheads and Cavaliers in 1642, Brooks said, that Max never quite fought through. That war had crossed the ocean and found its way to Perkins eight generations later. While the Perkins side of the family made him “the romantic, adventurous boy, indolent, graceful and frank, all gaiety, sweetness and animal charm,” the Evartses made him believe in doing things the hard way—“living against the grain.” Brooks said, “One or the other side ... of [the battle] constantly came to the front at crises in his life.”

John Evarts, a Welshman, was the first of Maxwell Perkins’s forebears to emigrate to the New World. As an indentured servant he sailed in 1635, settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and was made a freeman in 1638. A century and a half later he had only one direct descendant—Jeremiah Evarts. Born in 1782 and educated at Yale College, Evarts practiced law in New Haven. He was a stern, puritanical, religious man. A contemporary alleged that Evarts “had too much unbending integrity to be a popular lawyer.” He married Mehitabel Barnes, a widowed daughter of Roger Sherman, one of Connecticut’s signers of the Declaration of Independence. They settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where he assumed the editorship of the Panoplist, an organ of the orthodox Congregationalists. He began devoting his life entirely to pamphleteering and missionary enterprises, but did not restrict his proselytizing to religious concerns. For preaching abolition during one of his missions, he spent a year in a Georgia jail. In early March, 1818, traveling from Savannah, he was informed of the birth of a son—William Maxwell Evarts.

William entered Yale in 1833, where he was one of the founders of the Yale Literary Magazine. He graduated with honors, then attended law school at Harvard. Richard Henry Dana, who was writing up his maritime adventures in Two Years Before the Mast while matriculating at Harvard, later remembered: “The most successful speech made at the school during the whole time I was there, was made before a jury of undergraduates ... by Wm. M. Evarts.... If he does not become distinguished he will disappoint more persons than any other young man whom I have ever met with.” In 1843, Evarts married Helen Minerva Wardner in her hometown of Windsor. During the next twenty years, they produced seven sons and five daughters.

Evarts lived up to Dana’s expectations. His law career in New York City drew national attention in 1855 when he gave $1,000—one fourth of his entire fortune—to the Abolitionist cause. By 1889, when he made his last court appearance, he had taken part in a number of trials that tested basic principles of the Constitution. The Dictionary of American Biography dubbed him the “hero of the three great cases” of his generation—the Geneva arbitration case, the Tilden-Hayes election case of 1876, and the Andrew Johnson impeachment. In each trial he was victorious: He secured remuneration from foreign nations that fought against the Union during the Civil War, obtained the presidency for one man who did not win the popular vote of the nation, and defended another man’s right to continue serving as president.

When Evarts prepared his cases he invariably sought the counsel of learned friends. He often turned to Henry Adams, who wrote in his third-person autobiography: “In doubt, the quickest way to clear one’s mind is to discuss, and Evarts deliberately forced discussion. Day after day, driving, dining, walking he provoked Adams to dispute his positions. He needed an anvil, he said, to hammer his ideas on.” In 1877, President Hayes named Evarts Secretary of State. The New York legislature twice elected him to the United States Senate.

Upon his retirement from Washington, Evarts returned to Vermont, where he imperiously presided over family activities. His “White House” in Windsor was dark inside and full of Victorian clutter, including gold-framed portraits of Evarts ancestors and a white marble bust of himself wearing a toga.

The colorful Perkinses fill almost as many columns in the Dictionary of American Biography as the dour Evartses, but most of the Evartses failed to appreciate them. One Evarts cousin, ninety years after Max’s birth, still maintained, “The Perkinses had the wrong politics, sat on the wrong side of the church, and were all buried on the wrong side of the cemetery.”

Charles Callahan Perkins, Max’s paternal grandfather, inherited from his parents both the money and the temperament that naturally made him an influential friend of the arts in his native city of Boston. He was descended from Edmund Perkins, who emigrated to New England in 1650 and became a wealthy and philanthropic merchant—an East India magnate, who spawned several children who were Loyalists in the Revolution. Charles graduated from Harvard in 1843, having shown an interest in drawing and painting. He declined the customary opportunities to enter business and went abroad, determined to turn his enthusiasm for art into serious study. In Rome he mingled with several important artists of the day, but the limitations of his own talent kept him an amateur. He realized he could at least devote his life to the interpretation of art, and he became the first American art critic. In 1855 he married Frances D. Bruen of New York. Perkins kept close company with the Brownings in Europe and Longfellow in Boston. He wrote a half-dozen major studies of European sculpture.

By the time Charles Perkins’s three children came of age, most of his fortune had been exhausted. He resettled his family in New England and became friendly with Senator Evarts. Charles’s middle child, Edward Clifford—an alumnus of Harvard and Harvard Law School—met and fell in love with the senator’s daughter Elizabeth. In 1882, when they were each twenty-four, they married in Windsor.

Elizabeth was a dignified and gracious woman who, it was said, always walked at the same pace—not so slowly as to seem to have no purpose, but not so fast as to be unladylike—with her hands folded at her waist. She had often served as her father’s hostess in Washington. Her husband was dapper and possessed a freer spirit. They went to live in Plainfield, New Jersey, and Edward commuted to his law practice in New York, bicycling to and from the train station on a highwheeler, the first such vehicle in the town. Over thirteen years they had six children. She was a mother who never demanded good behavior but rather expected it; he was a gentle father.

The divergent traits of the two families came together in their second child, William Maxwell Evarts Perkins. Within him the two spirits—Perkins aestheticism and Evarts discipline—were blended. Even as a boy, Max had an artistic flair but New England common sense.

Every Sunday night, Edward Perkins read to his young family. “We all sat before our father and listened to Ivanhoe and The Rose and the Ring,” Max’s youngest sister, Fanny, remembered, “and we’d all laugh out loud, because the romance even then was so melodramatic.” For Max and his older brother, Edward, their father gave special readings of French books, which he translated as he went along to keep up his knowledge of the language. Spellbound, the two boys listened to the fabulous adventures of The Three Musketeers, General Marbot’s Memoirs, and Erckmann-Chatrian’s Conscript of 1813. Max grew infatuated with the military, especially the heroic accounts of Napoleon.

When he was sixteen, Max went to St. Paul’s Academy in Concord, New Hampshire, but was called home the following year to ease the pull on the family pursestrings. Then, in late October, 1902, Max’s father, who stubbornly disapproved of ever wearing topcoats, caught pneumonia. He died three days later at the age of forty-four. Edward C. Perkins had not saved any money, but his widow and six children were able to live comfortably on various family trust funds. Max completed his secondary education at the Leal School in Plainfield.

Edward, the eldest Perkins son, was away at Harvard, so Max took the chair at the head of the dinner table. Yankee instinct drove him to veil his grief and assume as many of his father’s roles as possible. He felt he must stand before his family as a monument of fortitude in adversity. He tended his younger siblings firmly but fondly, and they revered him. One morning after prayers, when his mother broke down in tears, he patted her on the shoulder until she stopped. A generation later, he told one of his own children, “Every good deed a man does is to please his father.”

As a teen-ager, Max passed through puppy love normally. “I kissed the dickens out of a pretty girl this afternoon,” he wrote Van Wyck Brooks in 1900. “It took about three hours of steady arguing to get it out of her, but finally she gave me permission.” Several summers he tutored children in Southampton, Long Island, and at age sixteen he worked as a counselor at Camp Chesterfield in New Hampshire. Out in the woods one day with several young hikers, Max heard terrible cries. He sent the boys back to camp and set off to find where the screams were coming from. He came to a barn and saw a woman standing in the doorway, struggling with two men who were holding her arms. One of the men said: “What do you want?” Max replied, “I’ve come to rescue the lady.” Years later Max would shake with laughter as he told that story, for it turned out that the woman had delirium tremens and the men were simply trying to get her indoors.

The following summer one small event occurred which was to affect Max for the rest of his life. He went swimming one afternoon with a younger boy named Tom McClary in a deep pond in Windsor. Tom was a poor swimmer, and halfway across the pond he lost his nerve and clamped his arms around Max’s neck. They both sank. Max fought free and swam toward shore. Then he thought of Tom. He looked over his shoulder and saw the boy floating face down. Max swam back, grabbed Tom’s wrist and towed him ashore. To pull him up the bank he clasped his hands under Tom’s stomach, which had the happy effect of making water gush out of Tom’s mouth, and in a moment he was breathing again. The boys agreed to say nothing of the accident, but it was not forgotten.

In that moment of Tom McClary’s near drowning, he confided but once, years later, to a friend, he saw that he was “by nature careless, irresponsible and timid.” He admitted: “When I was seventeen I realized this by one little incident not worth recounting when I was ineffectual, and I then made the only resolution that I ever kept. And it was, never to refuse a responsibility.” The oath was so solemn that selflessness and duty soon dominated Perkins’s judgment.

As generations of Perkinses had before him, Max went to Harvard. There he dropped his unused first name, his way of shucking his ancestors. When a senior in the class of 1907 he wrote,

To my mind, college is the place to expand, to overcome prejudices, to look at things through one’s own eyes. Here the boy first stands upon his own feet. Hitherto he has been in the hands of others to mould, now he must mould himself. He must cut loose from old ideas.

When he arrived at Harvard only the social side really appealed to Max. “I admired the ‘sport,’ the social butterfly,” he wrote in his college essay “Varied Outlooks.” “I too wished to dress well, to have many friends, to smoke and drink in cafes, to occupy a front row seat at light operas.” He had thick blond hair and from some angles a delicate beauty; from others he appeared striking rather than handsome. In yearbook photographs the literary critic Malcolm Cowley saw a close resemblance to Napoleon, one of Perkins’s childhood heroes, when the Corsican had been a young lieutenant of artillery—the “same wide, sensitive mouth, the same Roman nose under a high forehead, and the same big ears close to the skull.”

In November of his freshman year Perkins was arrested after the Yale game for being in the company of a drunk and disorderly classmate and locked up in jail. In December his grades entitled him to become the first member of his class to be placed on probation. It was a distinction “the sport” always remembered with pride.

Perkins carried a chip on his shoulder in Cambridge. Unlike the wealthy “Gold Coast” men, he was at Harvard on limited funds. Max worked in the summers and felt shabby. He was proud of the Evartses and Perkinses, and he was fond of saying that “some of them were very wealthy and some of them were very poor, but it is impossible to tell which were which.” In college, he felt as though his family’s dignity had been worn to its barest threads. That hardly affected the way others regarded him, but Max developed the New Englander’s horror of accepting anything he did not work for. “When a man does you a favor, he owns a little piece of you,” he once explained to his third daughter, who recalled further: “One of his best friends, who lived on Long Island, in a luxurious house, used to beg him to come on weekends. My father longed to go, but wouldn’t because he couldn’t afford to tip the butler.”

Instead, almost weekly, Perkins, in frayed shirt cuffs, walked to the home of one of his uncles, the Reverend Prescott Evarts, rector of Christ’s Church in Cambridge. “Max always seemed to enjoy the family gettogethers,” the clergyman’s son Richard remembered. “We played checkers, ate dinner, and often got into loud arguments, usually social questions, about the importance of heredity versus environment. But we all knew Sunday night with us was his way to save money.”

“Men measure social success by what clubs they belong to,” Perkins wrote as an upperclassman. When his Uncle Prescott, a Harvard alumnus, learned that Max had been invited to join Fox Club but couldn’t afford it, he wrote a check to cover the expenses. Max was reluctant to accept it but joined because, he observed, at Harvard the “importance of clubs simply could not be denied.”

Perkins was also on the staff of the Harvard Advocate, the campus literary magazine, and rose to its board of editors. For the most part his contributions satirized the gentlemanly practices and pursuits of Harvard students. In one essay, “On Girls and Gallantry,” he wrote: “Authorities affirm that man’s reverence for woman is the scale by which civilization is measured.... Of this much at least I am sure: not only are no two girls alike but no single girl is the same, save by the purest coincidence, at two different times.”

Three of Max’s Harvard friends were also making regular contributions to the Advocate: the poet John Hall Wheelock; Edward Sheldon, whose play Salvation Nell was a Broadway hit while he was still an undergraduate; and Van Wyck Brooks.

Brooks said he followed Perkins to Harvard from Plainfield because “I was a writer born,—I seemed always to have known this—and I supposed that Harvard was the college for writers.” Max had been there for a year before Van Wyck arrived, and he gave his hometown friend every chance to meet the right people. The two of them spent most of their time at the Stylus, the literary club Perkins enjoyed most in Cambridge. They lived together in its straw-yellow wooden house at 41 Winthrop Street. Brooks observed that a Puritanical “Cromwell” spirit in Max was uppermost then. For a while Max awakened Van Wyck regularly at six A.M. and read Herbert Spencer and other philosophers aloud to him. He occasionally wore a jaunty Norfolk jacket—as did Professor William James —but usually dressed in funereal grays and black.

Max chose to study economics. He did so, Brooks believed, because Max “did not like to know about railway rates and fire-insurance statistics.” The choice was an extension of one of his grandfather Evarts’s aphorisms: “I pride myself on my success in doing not the things I like to do, but the things I don’t like to do.” That kind of Yankee thinking, which found virtue in hardship, enabled Max to move upstairs at the Stylus, into a tiny attic with a table and a cot, and often to study through the night. Years later Perkins realized, “I threw away my education though by majoring in political economy which I hated, on some theory that for that very reason it was good discipline and that whatever courses in literature which I would have loved could give me, I would get in the natural course of things.” Max never read all he would have liked. Throughout his career, for example, he was embarrassed about his shallow knowledge of Shakespeare’s works.

Outside the Stylus Club, Max found most of his literary inspiration in “Copey‘s” circle. Whether or not they had been among his students, most men who were at Harvard during his forty years of residence in the Yard remembered Professor Charles Townsend Copeland. Copey was the little man from Calais, Maine, with wire-rim spectacles and a bulbous head—topped in the cooler months by a derby and in the summer by a straw boater. By the time he had become a member of the English Department at Harvard he had turned his back on an acting career, dropped out of Harvard Law School, and worked seven years on the staff of the Boston Post. He was neither an intellectual nor a scholar, but he had the ability to teach with almost mystical enthusiasm. Scanning sonnets meant less to Copey than performing them; a curmudgeonly iconoclast who turned ham before an audience of any size, he took Harvard by storm. Students flocked to his recitations of the English masterpieces and joined his indulgent literary discussions. But Copey’s reputation was deserved: He could breathe life into the dustiest classics.

Copeland was Perkins’s instructor when he took freshman English, and the young professor’s approach to literature roused Max. When Copey took over the expository writing course, English 12, Perkins immediately petitioned to be among the thirty persons admitted. “Copey was not a professor teaching a crowd in a classroom,” Walter Lippmann remembered in a tribute to Copeland. “He was a very distinct person in a unique relationship with each individual who interested him.”

The method of his teaching, as it lives in my own memory [Lippmann elaborated], seems to me to have been more like a catch-as-catch-can wrestling match than like ordinary instruction. What happened was that you were summoned to his chambers in Hollis and told to bring with you your manuscript. You were told how to read what you had written. Soon you began to feel that out of the darkness all around you long fingers were searching through the layers of fat and fluff to find your bones and muscles underneath. You could fight back but eventually he stripped you to your essential self. Then he cuffed the battered remains and challenged them into their own authentic activity.

Almost from the moment he and Professor Copeland became friends, Max applied himself to his studies. Copey’s influence on Perkins grew steadily. Certainly he developed Max’s editorial instincts. By his fourth year at Harvard, Max was earning honors grades. More important, he acquired Copeland’s love for writing. “So far as I am concerned,” Max wrote Copey years later, “you did more good than all the rest of Harvard put together.”

During Max’s senior year, a Miss Mary Church, who ran a girls’ finishing school on Beacon Street in Boston, asked Copeland to recommend a student to instruct her senior pupils in English composition. Copey picked Perkins. One of the dozen schoolgirls, Marjorie Morton Prince, clearly remembered this young man of twenty-two, just a few years older than his audience. “Every time he arrived we sat there hypnotized. We must have seemed absolutely dumb to him. He talked about writing as though it were the most important subject in the world. And we all worked like slaves for him. After a few weeks, Max started to wear dark glasses in class. We knew it was to keep from looking at us and getting embarrassed, because we all stared at him with a kind of dreamy glaze over our eyes.”

Max graduated from Harvard in June of 1907 with an Honorable Mention for his work in Economics. The only one of his circle of friends who did not celebrate his commencement with a grand tour of Europe, he went right to work. He did not even consider preparing for the bar (though his three brothers became lawyers). Instead, he took a job at the Civic Service House in the Boston slums. It called for teaching Russian and Polish immigrants at night and district visiting by day, but it allowed Max free time for reading and learning to type. At summer’s end he took a short vacation in Windsor, then went to New York to work on a newspaper. Van Wyck Brooks said, “Copey, no doubt, the old newspaperman, had worked on Max’s imagination.”

Getting a good newspaper job in those days usually depended on one’s connections. Perkins knew the son of the managing editor of the New York Times, but that proved to be almost as much of a liability as an asset. The Times hired Max, but it was the city editor—not the managing editor—who handed out assignments. This particular city editor liked to choose his own reporters. Max was put on “emergency work”—he was one of the reporters who hung around the office from six P.M. to three A.M. waiting for suicides, fires, and other nocturnal catastrophes. For three months Perkins sat through the night, staring at the city editor and wondering, “Does this man know the paper is paying me $15 a week?”

Then Max was moved up to police reporting, covering everything from murders in Chinatown to rent strikes on the Lower East Side. In due course he was promoted to the Times’s general staff. He scooped the city with his story on the collision of the S.S. Republic off Nantucket Light and covered William Jennings Bryan’s final campaign speech at Madison Square Garden.

Max volunteered for any risky assignment. Covering one story, he got strapped in the electric chair at Sing Sing; another time he accompanied champion race-car driver George Robertson in a record-breaking, sixty-miles-per-hour test ride in a Locomobile car No. 16. But few of Perkins’s articles got closer to the front page than the society news.

He enjoyed his independence and forever thereafter joked about his “roughing it” in his cold-water flat, saying, “I had to go to the Harvard Club for hot baths.” A few years later, Perkins spoke to one of Copey’s classes and said that a time comes when a man “assimilates the mental habits of a newspaperman and this will hurt him. It is obvious that the rapidity and carelessness with which the newspaperman must write will be fatal to any higher form of writing in the end; but I am thinking rather of the interest the reporter takes in events as such, quite apart from any true significance. He is a recorder and nothing more. He does not look below the surface of things.” Max was still interested in what he called “one of those professions whose practitioners deal in the most powerful of all commodities—words.” But he was tiring of the journalist’s erratic hours and constant deadlines.

During his years at the Times he had been calling on Louise Saunders, a girl with whom he had attended dancing class in Plainfield years earlier. Louise came from a prominent Plainfield family. Her mother, she once wrote, “was very beautiful—much more beautiful than were the other mothers in the little suburban town in which we lived.” Louise’s father, William Lawrence Saunders, pursued politics, engineering, and business. A friend of Woodrow Wilson, he was twice elected mayor of Plainfield. After patenting more than a dozen major inventions based on his experiments with compressed air, he became the first president of the Ingersoll-Rand corporation. He constantly entreated his two children to “learn the value of money” and he wanted everything to be “practical.”

Every Easter Sunday the Saunders family kept their team of horses stabled and walked to church. Louise adored the ritual, particularly one Easter in the 1890s when her hat was especially pretty; it was made of dark-green straw with a wreath of leaves and tiny red button roses. That Easter, for the first time, she became aware of the church itself; she noticed the blue ceiling sprinkled with bright silver stars. Under heaven’s blue dome she rested her hand on the pew in front of her and thought about her Easter hat. Three rows in front of the Saunderses sat the Perkins family. Louise’s eyes were drawn to Max, as she later confessed, “because he looked up at the blue ceiling and the stars. He seemed to wonder what could be understood.”

A few years later, when the Saunders daughters were in their early teens, their mother died of cancer. Mr. Saunders adored his girls but his overriding passion was for travel. His children sometimes accompanied him for months of living abroad, but more and more often he embarked alone on long voyages. Left at home, the girls were raised by a governess who persistently remarked to Louise, “Isn’t it a pity you’re not pretty like your sister.”

For a time Louise withdrew into herself. Years later, when Max Perkins began paying serious attention to her, she had grown out of her shell and had developed the talent and passion to become an actress. And by then Louise was beautiful. She was petite, with a fine, slim figure. She had long almond-shaped eyes, light-brown hair, a winning smile, and a small straight nose. Her father had converted a stable into a kind of theater for her. She became well known in Plainfield for her amateur performances as well as for several plays she had written.

Max found Louise Saunders delightfully feminine. She had intelligence, humor, and a volatile personality that contrasted with his steady one. Full of vitality, she could be temperamental and vain and unpredictable with her clever remarks. She depended on her intuition, what one daughter called her “uncanny knack for arriving at solutions for things without reasoning.”

Max first thought seriously about Louise in the summer of 1909, after she had invited him to a swimming party and picnic at her family’s place in Sea Girt, New Jersey. When he returned to New York he wrote her that he had left behind a pair of pajamas. Louise could not find them but came across somebody else’s bathing suit. “Here are your pajamas,” she explained. “I’m afraid they have suffered a sea change into something rich and strange.”

Max began inviting Louise to Windsor for weekends. On one occasion his younger sister Fanny spied on the two of them sitting in the parlor. They were holding a pincushion between them, trying to push out the needles stuck inside. “I don’t think they looked down at their hands once,” Fanny remembered. “They just gazed into each other’s eyes and seemed very much in love.”

Max Perkins was full of notions about women, pro and con. One of his favorite saws was that a man who didn’t marry was a coward, as was a woman who did. After a certain age, he believed, bachelors were just shirking responsibilities and women started looking for husbands only to avoid gossip or pity. But the warring factions in Max’s personality seemed balanced by Louise. In her he found every quality he deemed desirable in a wife. His romantic side responded to her beauty and her need to be protected; his cerebral side foresaw and welcomed a lifelong battle of wits. On her part, Louise spoke of Max as “my Greek God.”

By the winter of 1909, Max was looking for a job with regular hours. He heard about an opening in the advertising department at Charles Scribner’s Sons and got an appointment with the head of the company. Max had learned that one of his professors from Harvard was an old friend of Charles Scribner and so, before the interview, he solicited a letter from him. Barrett Wendell obliged.

Dear Charles:

May I have the pleasure of giving Maxwell Parkins this personal word of introduction to you. Old fellows like me don’t know young ones so well as we should like to. But I knew Perkins’s father well; and you as well, if I am not mistaken, knew his mother yes. ago—a daughter of Mr. Evarts. And I have known and admired all four of his grandparents. So when he came to college, he had a rather hard record to hold in my etteem; and he held it, happily and pleasantly. He has in him the right stuff. He is really the sort one can depend on.

“Of course, those who could most competently recommend me are my superiors on the Times,” Perkins wrote Mr. Scribner, after they had discussed the post of advertising manager,

and without their recommendation I could hardly hope for the position of which you spoke to me. Yet I cannot afford to set my bridge afire while I am crossing it. So far, I have said nothing here of my intention to leave the newspaper business. But if things so work out that the want of recommendation from my editors alone stands in my way with regard to this position, I shall ask instantly for it.

Max continued working at the Times, waiting for Scribner to make his decision. One night in the early spring of 1910, he was sent to the Bowery to cover a story. An enterprising burglar had rented a vacant store across the street from the Bowery Savings Bank and had dug a tunnel most of the way to the bank’s vault when his passageway collapsed. The thief was trapped underground. Perkins’s assignment was to report to his office every half-hour on the progress of the rescue mission. The nearest telephone to the scene was a private line in a saloon across the street. As policemen worked deep into the night, Perkins felt embarrassed about making repeated calls on the house, so he ordered a drink with each call. It was almost dawn when the robber was brought to the surface and arrested. Max went home to collapse from intoxication as much as exhaustion. Just a few hours later his roommate, Barry Benefield, awakened him with the message that Mr. Scribner wanted to see him that morning at nine.

Max was tired and hung over throughout the interview, but Scribner was nonetheless impressed by the young man’s earnestness. Perkins had explained his motives to him previously in a letter:

I know that people generally, and with considerable reason, suspect a newspaperman of wanting the quality of steadiness. They do not think him capable of settling down to a regular and unexciting life. In case you share in that idea, I want to tell you that aside from my natural interest in books and all connected with them, I am anxious to make this change because of my desire for a regular life; and I have the strongest reasons a young man can have for desiring such a life, and for liking it once I have it.

At noon on December 31, 1910, he and Louise Saunders were married in Plainfield’s Holy Cross Episcopal Church, under the silver stars. William Saunders gave his new son-in-law a gold watch as a wedding present, which Max carried from that day on. As a minor hearing deficiency worsened each year, it became Perkins’s habit to put the watch up to his weak left ear, then slowly move it away to measure his auditory powers by the distance at which he could still discern the ticking.

Max and Louise honeymooned in Cornish, New Hampshire—just across the river from Windsor—in a small cottage belonging to one of the Evarts cousins. Louise’s father had told his daughters that when each started out in marriage he would present her with a home. The Perkinses accepted his offer—though Max felt uneasy about it—and when they returned to New Jersey they crossed the threshold of a small, plain house at 95 Mercer Avenue in North Plainfield. Shortly after settling in, they took back all the duplicate silver trays and bread baskets they received as wedding presents and bought a thirty-inch marble statue of the Venus de Milo. It became a favorite possession.

Perkins was happy with his new job and its more normal hours. The position of advertising manager at Scribners required imagination (though not daring), an instinctive appreciation for the literary product, and a feel for what the public would buy. Forgetting his college training in economics, Max sometimes spent well over his budget on books he liked. In 1914 one of the editors of the Scribner staff left to become a partner in another firm. Charles Scribner had been so impressed with Perkirls’s work that he moved him up to the fifth floor. Max’s brother Edward recalled, “He used to say they made an editor out of him to keep the company from going bankrupt.”

In almost the same time it took Max to become an editor at Scribners, he and Louise had produced three children—all daughters. Bertha, born in 1911, was named for Louise’s mother. When the second girl arrived two years later, Max wanted to name her Ascutney, after his beloved mountain in Vermont. Upon Louise’s protest she was named Elisabeth, after Max’s mother, and later nicknamed “Zippy,” the attempt of a younger sister to pronounce her real name. Two years after Zippy came Louise Elvire—called Peggy and a number of variations.

In the summer of 1916, Max volunteered for reserve duty in the United States Cavalry and was sent to the Mexican border with a company composed of men from the Plainfield area. While he was away, Louise’s sister insisted that she and her husband could not afford the large house her father had given them, and she proposed swapping homes with the Perkinses. Shortly after Max returned to New Jersey, the Perkinses packed up and moved the Venus to the front hall at 112 Rockview Avenue. Across the living room mantel Louise painted in blue and gold Gothic script an aphorism her husband had composed: “The more a man is, the less he wants.”

Two years later the Perkinses’ fourth child was born. Max was on the stairs in the house in Plainfield early that August morning when he heard a baby’s cry. He wrote of the event years later: “I said to myself, ‘That’s the cry of a boy baby. God sent me a boy to make up for my not going to war.’ ” When he learned the facts he dispatched a one-word telegram to his mother: GIRL. She was named Jane.

Among his five women, Max enjoyed posing as a hardhearted misogynist. To the repetitious questions about his not having any sons, he replied flintily, “Oh yeah, we had sons, but we always drowned them.” Whenever he heard of a married man dying, he remarked, “She killed him.” It was more the humor of the period than an animosity toward women.

Perkins found his own wife formidable. Louise was a woman of unending energy, every bit as strong-willed and determined as her husband. Their love match, according to Andrew Turnbull, the literary historian, was a little like the “union of a Scotch professor and a midinette.” It was a battle of the sexes made unique by the eccentricities of both their characters. At the start, relatives whispered of their arguments as “getting adjusted,” but soon it was clear that they were more serious than that. The romance in their marriage disappeared. Max’s emotions went behind a stone wall of Yankee reserve, while Louise’s were always on display. She wanted him to respect the acting career she desired, but he believed that women should not be seen on stage. Before their wedding, Max had extracted one simple promise from Louise: She would give up her theatrical aspirations.

There were other injustices Louise had to put up with. While Evartses were often scornful of Perkinses, they looked with absolute disdain upon Louise Saunders. “She was the actress type to us, all made up with cheek rouge—a real scalp-hunter who liked her men,” one of them once said. “She was the last kind of woman we expected Max to marry.” Men liked her, but for years afterward, all the strait-laced women watched Louise’s every move, as though expecting some wicked act.

In fact, Louise was more worldly than any of the Evartses, and considerably more kindhearted. The clan in Windsor interpreted her behavior as haughty. They resented the fact that she had a wealthy father who allowed her to fling money around. Max, like them, had been taught that something earned was worth more than a gift. Louise could be frivolous, and Max had always been a pillar of prudence. But the instant Max’s mother expressed something less than approval of Louise’s domestic abilities, he hastened to insist, “Mamma, I didn’t marry Louise for a house-keeper. I married for companionship.”

Louise cared for their daughters, though she was sometimes a distracted parent. She still had loftier ambitions than merely sitting at home to raise four children. When she was not writing children’s plays, she busied herself directing amateur productions, or redecorating her house. Early in his marriage Max wrote Van Wyck Brooks, “Louise could make a hovel more attractive than a palace.”

No love was stronger than that which Max felt for his daughters, and they clung very close to him. Every evening he read to them, starting with simple poems and working up to more complicated nineteenth-century novels as they grew older. Max instilled romantic values into his eldest daughter Bertha to such an extent that for years she wanted to grow up to become a knight—Max had bought her a toy sword and armor to train for it. When Zippy said she’d love to see a burning house, he took one of the old family dollhouses, stuffed it with paper, and set it afire, delighting her as flames came out of the windows and the roof caved in. In the winter he put on a balaclava helmet, a knitted cap that covered most of his face, and coasted down long, snow-covered hills on the same sled with Peg. “Uncle Max imposed all sorts of strict rules on his girls,” one niece said, “but none of them was ever enforced.”

Whenever he was separated from his family, even when he was no farther than his office, Max felt low and stayed close by writing letters to them. He insisted that his secretary, the dedicated Irma Wyckoff, come to work every Lincoln’s Birthday holiday to type up the elaborate valentines he wrote and illustrated. When the family was away in Windsor he tried writing to at least one daughter every night. Sometimes the letters were splendid works, full of original fairy tales. They were always expressions of his love that any child could understand. He once wrote Zippy: “A daddy can’t have any fun without his children. There is no use his trying. Everywhere he goes he thinks, ‘Yes, this would be fun if only my little girls were here, but what good is it without them.’ He can’t get them out of his head. He may go to see statues of something, but they are not what he really sees;—he sees his little girls, playing, far away. But when he gets their letters, then he is happy.” During summers Perkins joined his vacationing family in Windsor as often as he could. He always returned from Paradise rejuvenated, ready to face the accumulated papers on his untidy desk.