Could the Wolfe-Perkins relationship survive in today's "bottom line" marketplace? Doubtful. This indeed is a remarkable moment in our literary history. I wonder if anyone reads Wolfe today. When I met Dick Crooks in 1960, he was a Wolfe fanatic. On my shelf he's like Henry Miller, someone I prefer in excerpts rather than whole.
Wolfe, Perkins, Time and the River
In 1929, Perkins had edited Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe's first novel, cutting some 66,000 words. By the end of 1933, Wolfe had a sequel book that was four times as long as the uncut version of the first novel, over ten times the length of most novels, and growing at a rate of 50,000 words a month. Recognizing that there was more river than time, Perkins tried to force a halt. The first installment, delivered to him at Scribner's by "lone Wolfe" one December midnight, was a stack of typed manuscript two feet high; overall, the manuscript was at a million words. Six or seven nights a week throughout much of 1934 they met to cut and argue -- Wolfe showing up to many meetings with freshly-written material, which Perkins would read, admire, and mostly cut. He declined Hemingway's offer of a Key West fishing getaway with the kind of 'big game' sentence Papa would have liked: "I am engaged in a kind of life and death struggle with Mr. Thomas Wolfe...."
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