The Sons of Maxwell Perkins: Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Their Editor (review)

Since the bodies of correspondence between Maxwell Perkins on the one side and Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe on the other have been previously published in full, we cannot expect much new on that score from the present volume—except, perhaps, for what we may find in the introduction. There we can learn that Hemingway was a lout and a bully, Fitzgerald was a wussy, Wolfe a paranoid logorrheic, that all three were alcoholics and, more than anything else, nuisances to be around. With lapidary wisdom Matthew Bruccoli declares that "great writers have something wrong with them; the greatest ones are deeply flawed," and Maxwell Perkins, he says, "knew that great writers are born troublemakers." Thank God, then, for editors like Perkins and Bruccoli himself (said to have "written or edited nearly seventy volumes [sixty-eight? sixty-nine?] about or by Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe") who abide the flaws and foibles of such troublemakers with a kind of sweet and forgiving patience. Robert Penn Warren once remarked that every author needs a good copy editor; one might go further and say that even an editor requires a good copy editor—at least on the evidence of the passage on page xxv of the introduction to The Sons of Maxwell Perkins, which declares that "Fitzgerald regarded 597 Fifth Avenue [the address of Scribner's Sons] as the Mermaid Tavern revidivus. . . ."