Genius

& Max Perkins: Please tell me it’s double-spaced.
    Assistant: No such luck.

& Assistant: Every other publisher in town has already turned it down.
    Max Perkins: Is it any good?
    Assistant: Good? No. But it’s unique.

& Zippy Perkins: That’s a very long paragraph.
    Max Perkins: It started four pages ago.

& Max Perkins: You’re too young to be in love.
    Zippy Perkins: How old do you have to be?
    Max Perkins: Forty.

& Thomas Wolfe: So I’m looking at that man now. Well, congratulations. On finding one genius. Two, if you count Hemingway. As for this one, he’ll persevere.

& Thomas Wolfe: We are not those characters we want to be. We’re those characters we are. I’m Caliban. That island creature, monstrous and deformed. Caliban. So ugly. So alien. Hurt and shunned into poetry.

& Thomas Wolfe: It’s about America. All of it.
    I’m trying to capture everything. Every city and village and stone and leaf and man and child. And every farm and flower, every river. It’s about the one acetylene torch, white, bright truth that burns in the heart of every man in this country.
    And that is the search for a true father. I don’t mean biological father. I’m not talking about sperm. I mean, I search for the need of a father of our spirit. It’s about every single thing that makes this country great.
    It’s mammoth!

& Thomas Wolfe: Max says the only ideas worth writing about are the big ideas.
    Max Perkins: Big ideas, fewer words.
    Thomas Wolfe: You see, I’m lost without him.

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& Max Perkins: Have you thought about another title?
    Thomas Wolfe: You’ll hate it.

& Louise Perkins: Have you read Tom’s book, Mrs. Bernstein?
    Aline Bernstein: Yes, Mrs. Perkins, it’s dedicated to me.
    Thomas Wolfe: I wouldn’t have been able to do it without my sweet jewess. She bought the paper and the pencils. And paid for the typist... She put a roof over my head and food in my prodigious belly.

& Thomas Wolfe: I have it.
    Max Perkins: You have it?
    Thomas Wolfe: The new book.
    Max Perkins: With you?
    Thomas Wolfe: Yes.
    Max Perkins: Well, let’s have it.
    Thomas Wolfe: Bring it in, guys.

& Max Perkins: Now, to begin, on page one.
    Thomas Wolfe: Oh, lord. Page one?

& Max Perkins: Now, look here, you’ve given 80 pages to Eugene on the platform before the train arrives. That is, perhaps, gilding the Lily a bit as to suspense? I mean, I’ll only wait so long for a train.

& Thomas Wolfe: «Eugene saw a woman. Her eyes were blue. So quickly did he fall for her that no one in the room even heard the sound.» Period. End of chapter four.
    Max Perkins: Only 98 more to go!

& Max Perkins: Tom, we discussed a transition line. One line to bridge the cut. You’ve given me 50 new pages on the doctor. You’ve given me his whole life story and his father’s whole life story.
    Thomas Wolfe: I like the doctor.
    Max Perkins: Well, so do I. I adore the doctor. But by god, 50 pages?

& Thomas Wolfe: Some books are supposed to be long, you know? Thank Christ Tolstoy never met you. We’d have that great novel War and Nothing.

& Max Perkins: It’s my job, it’s what I do.
    Louise Perkins: Every minute of every day?
    Max Perkins: And if it takes years, it takes years.
    Louise Perkins: You’re never going to get this time back.
    Max Perkins: It’s one damn vacation, for Christ’s sake! Louise, a writer like Tom, I get one in a lifetime.
    Louise Perkins: You get your daughters for the same lifetime.

& Thomas Wolfe: Come on! There must be one song you like.
    Max Perkins: Flow gently, sweet Afton... I’m partial to Flow gently, sweet Afton.

& Thomas Wolfe: The whole thing about jazz is that these fellas are artists. They interpret the song, letting the music pour on out, riff upon riff, just like I do with words. To hell with standard forms. To hell with Flaubert and Henry James. Be original. Hmm? Blaze new trails. That’s the whole ugly gorilla.
    Max Perkins: Ugly gorilla. Of course.

& Max Perkins: Editors should be anonymous. More than that, there’s always the fear that I deformed your book. Who’s to say it wasn’t the way it was meant to be when you first brought it in? War and peace. Not just war.
    That’s what we editors lose sleep over, you know? Are we really making books better? Or just making them different?

& Aline Bernstein: So, I don’t exist anymore. I’ve been edited.

& Aline Bernstein: I am very sorry for what’s going to happen to you... Enjoy the time with Tom while you have it because after him... there is a great hush.

& Max Perkins: I think back in the caveman days, our ancestors would huddle around the fire at night and wolves would be howling in the dark, just beyond the light. And one person would start talking. And he would tell a story, so we wouldn’t be so scared in the dark.

& Max Perkins: ... And then maybe all your words will be worth five of Scott’s.

& Thomas Wolfe: More and more, I trouble myself with that. «The legacy.» Will anyone care about Thomas Wolfe in 100 years? Ten years?
    F. Scott Fitzgerald: When I was young, I asked myself that question every day. Now, I ask myself, «can I write one good sentence?»

& Max Perkins: The surgeon said his brain was filled with tumors. A myriad of tumors. That’s the word he used, «myriad.» I think Tom would like that. .... The plural of «myriad» is «myriads», by the way.

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