Underneath the usual authorial complaints about royalties and
editorial requests for finished manuscripts, Hemingway's dedication
to his craft, and Perkins's to Hemingway, come through in this
carefully abridged selection. Elsewhere Hemingway wrote, "Plenty of
times people who write the best write the worst letters." But he
only occasionally exemplifies this rule himself. His correspondence
with august editor Maxwell Perkins, spanning the businesslike and
the personal, has the benefit of focusing on Hemingway's literary
career, which sprawled through the Selected Letters (1981). Here we
get to look over their shoulders during Hemingway's early time with
Scribner's, in which he often has to defend (and sometimes amend)
his use of strong language, starting with The Sun Also Rises, and
to battle against cuts in magazine serializations ("Half the
writing I do is elimination"). In this rich, sometimes swamping
flow of letters, we see Hemingway's guard going gradually, but
never totally, down and Perkins moving from literary associate to
confidant (thanks to a fishing trip to Key West). Amid the
quotidian debates about advertising and royalty advances, Perkins
also has to insert himself into the Fitzgerald-Hemingway rivalry
(Hemingway's side is candid but brutal) and diplomatically
participate in literary feuds with Gertrude Stein and others, and
critical skirmishes, notably involving Max Eastman, whom Hemingway
wrestled to the floor in Perkins's office. Given Hemingway's
fundamental unreliability about himself, Fitzgerald maven Bruccoli
(Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1981,
etc.) has something less than a biographic account, even after
judicious assembly, sundry cuts, and helpful footnotes and
chronologies. Still, these letters deliver the documentary
evidence, sometimes unflatteringly, but always for Hemingway's
serious craftsmanship and Perkins's subtle caretaking. Although
this volume represents only a fractional side of Hemingway's life,
it carries his last word on Perkins: "You are my most trusted
friend as well as my God damned publisher." (Kirkus Reviews)
In 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Maxwell Perkins about
a young American expatriate in Paris, an unknown writer with a
""brilliant future"". When Perkins wrote to Ernest Hemingway
several months later, he began a correspondence spanning more than
two decades and charting the career of one of the most influential
American authors of this century. The letters collected here are
the record of that professional alliance and of Hemingway's
development as a writer.
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