Writing to American author and artist Joseph Stanley Pennell, renowned literary editor Maxwell Perkins asserts that books should be judged like people.
July 26, 1944
Dear Stan:
I suppose you have already seen the enclosed picture. I send it because Brady might have taken it on one of the battlefields of Maryland or Virginia. You only have to imagine horses, in place of the mechanical vehicles. The trouble with reviewers, and with editors, is so simple that nobody gets it. They ought to just take a book and give themselves to it, and read it like a regular citizen and see whether they like it or not. They ought not to apply their standards and frames of reference, and all that, to it, until afterwards. But you cannot make them do it. It is something that only simple-minded people do perhaps. I know that, because of editors that have a magnificent equipment and appreciation too, and yet when it comes to some book that needs to be revised, they can only think of its revision, not in terms of the writer’s intent and capacities, but in the terms of some classic that they measure everything of that kind against. If it is a book about a prostitute, it has to be thought of in terms of “Moll Flanders” or “Maggie”—which I never read. Therefore, anything true in the original—which, of course, is very rare—baffles them because they haven’t anything with which to compare it directly. They ought to judge books the way they judge people. When they meet a person and talk to him, they do not say that he does not resemble some other person, or does resemble him, or make any such comparison. They just size him up on his own terms. That’s the only way to judge. It is one of those things that are so simple, and that when you say it, it does not seem to mean anything. But it is because of that, that many a reviewer and an editor is nothing like what he has the abilities to be.
Yours,
FURTHER READING
To view 8 quotes on writing from A. Scott Berg’s biography of Perkins entitled Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, click here.
Maxwell Perkins edited the novels of literary greats such as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. To read the New York Times review of The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, click here.