Genius Catcher: Mistaking the nameless as a hero

【Literary Corner】

A film that is doomed to failure

Because of the Genius Catcher movie, I remembered director Michael Glendag's name firmly. There are so many biographies of influential people in the world that can be filmed and televisionized, and there are so many American heroes to be shaped, but he chose an editor who has been competing on paper all his life as the protagonist, which makes me awe-inspired when I am engaged in editing. Of course, there is also a hint of curiosity in the tribute, what kind of investment team makes a director so indifferent to business?

The fate of genius is nothing more than two kinds: one is that the soil is fertile and the genius shines; the other is that the genius is born at the wrong time and finally becomes Zhongyong. If it is the latter, there may be some points of view, genius degeneration into a mediocre person is lamentable after all; and the fate of the protagonist of "Genius Catcher" is precisely the former - the genius meets the time and place, and the sense of fate in harmony disappears. Moreover, an editor's career, no matter what he has contributed to literature and publishing, is clearly devoid of storytelling and drama — how can the story of Bó Lè compare to the ups and downs of Maxima? A film that lacks a sense of destiny, storytelling, and drama is doomed to fail to receive high box office returns. Without the box office, movies are a dead end.

Therefore, it is not surprising that "Genius Catcher" was discontinued within a few days of its release. It's a film destined to be commercially successful. Unfortunately, however, in art, it has also achieved nothing. Unlike the original, the film does not include Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but only chooses Max Perkins and Wolff's interactions. The choice is understandable, because an author like Wolff "is the limit of the challenge to the work of the editor, including tolerance for his personal temperament."

But this one-on-one character relationship is obviously difficult to reflect the talent of the catcher; it is also difficult to reflect the talent of the captured genius. "Genius Catcher", like the title of the book "Genius Editor", was originally a pun, referring to both the genius that the editor captured and the genius that the editor himself was. Max Perkins is called a "genius" rather than a "lucky editor" because he has made more than one author go from nameless to famous, and he is famous all over the world; Wolff and other writers are called "geniuses" not only because they wrote sensational works at a young age, but also because they wrote their times and created literary classics.

Wolf in the movie is more like a neurotic madman, and the crazy behavior of his much older girlfriend reinforces his paranoia. This paranoia weakened his writing talent and completely masked his early wisdom, diligence and simplicity. In fact, Wolff, who grew up between the countryside and the land, Wolff, who died early at the age of 38, wolff, who wrote the immortal famous articles "Angels, Looking home" and "Time and The River", was a writer who was admired by Faulkner, and his contemporaries Faulkner listed Wolff as the best writer of their generation.

Obviously, the film is more influenced by Hemingway, and the writer and director are hemingway's fans. The book writes that Hemingway always called Wolff a "giant baby", saying that he was "like a bison, talking loudly and behaving recklessly"; and the director also generously gave Hemingway the role of the female writer Marcia Davenport who persuaded Wolfe to reconcile with the editor.

Max Perkins in the movie is more like a dull old antique, unsmiling, extremely boring, and even being led by Wolff in the bar to stomp his feet is so uninteresting. Perkins in the book is certainly boring and stereotypical, for example, he has always worn a hat, commuted to work only by train, ate only a fixed seat, only ordered a fixed meal, and even sent to all authors the same book, always "War and Peace". But when he meets a new author, he will argue with the conservative boss and make witty remarks; when he meets a narcissistic and widowed female writer, he will also skillfully withdraw the manuscript while accepting their crush.

More importantly, he became a trusted good friend to all of them, such as Hemingway, who was "like a bull," Fitzgerald, wolff, who had "ten thousand devils and an angel, and so on." What an emotional intelligence that must be! The line I admire most in the movie is wolf's saying of Perkins: "In the depths of your cold and widowed soul, there must be a savage and unrestrained side." "Unfortunately, it's just a line.

The most intolerable thing is that the film completely ignores Max's romance, delicacy and sentimentality , which could have added color to the film. The real Max Perkins corresponded with Elizabeth Lemon for 25 years and maintained a lifelong "pure" spiritual love outside of their marriage. He was so talented, charismatic, and affectionate in his correspondence that Elizabeth Lemon never married. After his death, she kept all of his letters and unreservedly contributed them to biographers.

In fact, Max is also humorous and funny. After giving birth to four daughters in a row, he ushered in a fifth, so the telegrams to his mother became impatient, saying only one word, "one after another." But he was a good father and loved his five daughters.

It's a shame that two originally interesting geniuses have been transformed into this by the movie. This is further proof that for the delicate relationship between the editor and the author, the text always has an advantage over the picture. It may also prove that, apart from biographies, editors are never suitable for the protagonist.

The Genius Editor: A Decent Biography

Before the release of the movie The Genius Catcher, I had already read its original literary book, The Genius Editor– Max Perkins and A Literary Age. The book is very thick, with 450,000 words, and it is a decent full biography. Because I have been an editor for more than ten years, I know the bitterness of it, and I also feel the difficulty of an editor hooking up with a literary era, so I almost without thinking about it. What's more, this is the famous biography of Max Perkins, who is the "god" of the world's editors! In the United States after World War II, too many young people stepped into the publishing industry because of him. Without him, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and especially Wolff, the road to fame would have been even more arduous, and the golden age of American literature would probably not have been so glorious.

During World War I and World War II, it was recognized as the golden age of American literature in the history of literature. From 1930 to 1938 alone, there were three Nobel laureates: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, and Pearl Buck. The three subsequent Nobel Prize-winning writers: William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck, were also mainly creative during this period.

Of course, the Nobel Prize is only one aspect of measuring literary achievement, but the key is that the works of these writers have not faded to this day, have become eternal classics, including a group of other excellent writers, poets and playwrights. For example, the book mentions Fitzgerald, who wrote "The Great Gatsby" and "Gentle Night", Tom Wolfe, who wrote "Angels, Looking Home" and "Time and The River", and Elliott, who wrote "The Wasteland", and so on.

Few books mention that in the shining military merits of literature, there is also the sweat of editors. In the average person's impression, an editor is a person who makes a living by finding typos. In the literary ecology, they are parasites, and all professional life is inseparable from the creative labor of the author. As for whether he can become a symbiote of the author and whether he can obtain "subjectivity", it all depends on the author's fame and attitude. Just like there is a bird in nature called a tiger finch, which makes a living from the meat crumbs between the tiger's teeth, fortunately the tiger is happy to be friends with it, otherwise it will go extinct.

However, just as the tiger will not allow the tiger to be king, no author can tolerate an editor coming to the fore and robbing him of his glory, even though they know best the efforts of editors in the process of turning their work from manuscript to book, and they are most aware of the role that editors play in their rise to fame. Fortunately, one of the professional qualities of editors is what Max Perkins calls "striving to be anonymous"; we are engaged in this line of work, and the most heard professional motto is also "editors should be good at making wedding dresses for people", to be willing and good at hiding behind the author, both to contribute their wisdom and hide their own figures. Because of his sober career orientation, Max idolized a famous American staff officer. For the general, this staff officer is indispensable. His work was to "cool the general's head; to edit his important documents and to put them into drafts; to present criticism with roundabout tactics and perseverance; and to restore the general's self-confidence".

In the book, Max has a lot of golden sentences that make editors feel good, such as "people are more troublesome than books"; for example, someone asks him why don't you write, he says "because I am an editor"... And many of his failures make us feel more empathy. For example, he undoubtedly played a huge role in dealing with Wolff's manuscripts, like finding roses in the weeds, he removed the redundancy of Wolff's mud and sand, retained his essence, and made him truly him. Without Perkins, it is unknown whether there would have been Wolff as a writer in the world. Just like without Long Shihui, it is also unknown whether China will have "Lin Hai Snow Field". However, after success, especially when the next one cannot be written, the writer will accuse: Why do you think you are right? What qualifications do you have to delete my manuscript?

In fact, such a situation can happen to editors of any country in any era. How can editors determine their authority? The answer is only known to God.

For example, he asked a writer to write for ten years, but he got garbage, and when he gave up, the writer switched to other publishing houses, but suddenly won the grand prize, or suddenly wrote a super bestseller. For an editor, the experience of failure is always more than success, even if he is called a "genius".

Obviously, Perkins, like all editors, hesitates in judging manuscripts all the time, ponders the author's mind all the time, fights frustration all the time, and doubts himself all the time. Compared with the achievements of a genius editor, I can better appreciate his frustration and grievances, and I can also appreciate his self-deprecation and humor. He once told Elizabeth Lemon: "The so-called publisher is the person who is blamed when the book does not sell, and the best seller of the book is ignored." ”

In reality, there are many interesting examples of this aspect. For example, our publishing house once had an author, as the fame of writing became more and more famous, more and more awards were won, and the title of the editor who helped him all the way - and called zhang san bar - also changed all the way, from "teacher Zhang" to "three teachers" to "old Zhang", and finally to "Xiao Zhang", its shape can be imagined.

Of course, if I hadn't been an editor, I wouldn't have been able to read so much about my career and life in this biography. To some extent, the biographer still failed to grasp the point, he wrote a person's life in detail, and even the resume of the relevant writer he did not bother to write, but did not highlight how different an editor's life is - in addition to paper work, in addition to the divine judgment and clear sense of service, the editor's life is across the dividing line between art and the market, spirit and material, he needs to constantly deal with people with distinct personalities and sensitive nature, so his tolerance, restraint, compassion, His courage to fight repeatedly and his inexhaustible enthusiasm are more than any other profession requires. Editing is a profession that forces people to learn tolerance and optimism.

Perhaps, all writing is, it is easy to do addition, and it is the hardest to do subtraction. Even I can't help but think that if the author of this biography happens to be an editor, maybe he can better appreciate the real core of the publishing ecology, and really present the "nameless" and "promising" editing, then he will reduce the length by one-third, making the book easier to become a textbook and desk book for editors around the world.

What kind of animal is an editor?

From the perspective of both art and market, editing is an amphibian. He must have his own insight and judgment on the literary content of the manuscript; and he must have a reasonable estimate of the market value of a book. An editor who does not weigh and does not calculate is not a good editor; but an editor who only weighs and can only calculate accounts is not a good editor. The balance between calculating temporary gains and losses and looking to the future is sometimes the biggest test for editors. Because writers are constantly changing, so is the market. So, editing is a bit like a chameleon.

In the book, Max Perkins plays three roles in front of three writers. In front of Fitzgerald, he was a fire extinguisher and a cash machine. Fitzgerald had a wife who loved to write and live more extravagantly (the People's Literature Publishing House had just recently published her novel", "Leave Me Waltz"), so his life was always chaotic and unsatisfactory. And as his most trusted editor, Fitzgerald told Perkins the most: Can you advance a few hundred dollars to save me? Most of the time, Perkins found ways to satisfy him. This is certainly a benefit of perkins serving a family business. Fitzgerald was also a faithful author, and he never failed to account.

In hemingway's presence, Perkins was a listener, an encourager, and more like an obedient. The manuscript submitted by Father Hai almost never needs to be revised, and in terms of personality, he is also rational and sober, acting decisively, and "there is a weak side of bullying others in his personality." He was furious when Perkins was good, and he started the fire without mercy. He always felt that the publisher's marketing was not good, his books did not receive enough attention, and he always had to compete with Fitzgerald in writing. He liked to fish, so he dragged Perkins to him, completely ignoring the fact that he was a man who refused to change the trajectory of his life and even chose only one place for the vacation. Perkins was cautious in front of Hemingway, and he said to his daughter, "You must find an opportunity to give advice to Hemingway's manuscript." He was also Hemingway's most trusted editor, and in fact, it was through Hemingway that he met Wolff.

In front of Wolff, Perkins was more like a father. He gave all his patience to help Wolfe revise the draft, and also paid all his sincerity to resolve his anxiety about fame, endure his misunderstandings, harshness, willfulness and even betrayal, and devoted himself to helping Wolfe plan his career without complaint or regret. He treated Wolfe like his own family.

He "watches people get off the plate", constantly changes his role, gets along with authors with different personalities and different demands, but is equally arrogant and arrogant, equally sensitive and fragile, maintains their relationship with the publishing house, maintains their image in front of readers, and also maintains their creative potential, and more importantly, to ensure their interests. At the same time, he had to take care to maintain a proper position between them, so that they felt that they were not favoring one over the other. For editors, the author is a friend, and a friend is the author, which is more troublesome than other situations, and even the book refers to this relationship as "incest.".

One of perkins' greatest things is that he often "makes all his authors feel like he values their work as much as the author himself," and whatever happens to the author is no small matter. He just makes the author feel that "he knows the author's mind better than any editor or publisher."

Perhaps, the most interesting detail is this. Wolfe's last novel, perkins' daily life, behavioral quirks, including ear diseases, are written into the book — everyone knows that Wolff's writing has always been close to life, to his familiar characters, so that many friends avoid him, afraid that one day they will become his characters. He likened Perkins to a "fox" and uglified him. By the time Perkins saw it, Wolfe had died, and he had been designated by Wolff as the disposer of the literary legacy. Whether to protect his own image and delete all this; or to adhere to the editorial policy of not interfering with the work, and to retain all this, perkins is the highest test perkins faces as an editor. In the end, professionalism overcame human weaknesses, and the great Perkins withstood the test — he left his "ugliness" and his glorious personality.

Of course, Wolff is not all ugly, and there is a true record of Perkins' work:

"Oh, cunning fox, how simple your cunning is, how cunning your simplicity is; how crooked you are when you give orders, so direct when you give orders!" You are upright and not deceitful, calm and not jealous, just and not blind, fair, sharp-eyed, strong in heart without complaining and hateful, honest and not despicable, noble and not shallow in doubt, simple and not clever – but you have never suffered a loss in a bargaining deal! ”

It's so accurate, so subtle! Wolfe deserves to be a genius writer.

Editing happy moments

It is gratifying that all perkins have been rewarded for all their efforts. Fitzgerald called him "our common father" and designated him as the handler of the literary legacy. Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea five years after his death, but did not hesitate to dedicate the book to him. Wolff, too, dedicated him the title of his most important book, Time and the River, and later, despite the breakdown of the relationship due to misunderstanding, in the last moments of his life, he appointed the distant Perkins as the handler of his literary legacy.

As an editor, whenever I see these details, a warm tide will rise in my heart. In a publishing ecology where profit-seeking and mutual suspicion is far more likely to occur than mutual trust, it is really touching and admirable that editors and authors can establish such a relationship.

Perhaps Phi Sha's discovery of anonymous authors and their fame is only a small aspect of Max Perkins' talented editor, and it is his true talent to gain the trust of almost all authors and help them gain greater literary influence before and after them. As written in the book, the best state of the relationship between the author and the publisher may be like a "marriage of intellect," and Max Perkins is the most loyal, trustworthy, and most able to help the other person to be a better partner.

Max Perkins served at Scribner For thirty-six years, adhering to the duty of a supporting role and a parasite, but eventually living into a legend and idol in the American book publishing industry, and even in the world book publishing industry — the core of any profession is to be a human being.

Bennett Surf, the founder of the famous Random House, is also a descendant of Max Perkins, and in "I and Random House", he mentions Scribner Press several times, and also mentions veteran editor Max Perkins. He always used the metaphor of this legendary figure to dispel the author's dissatisfaction with the unfavorable marketing of the publisher. This metaphor is about book advertising and sales. Max said: Advertising a book is like a stuck car, if the car is really stuck in the mud, ten people can't push it; if it has a little looseness, one person can push it on the road. In the same way, if a book absolutely cannot be sold, then the world's advertising is useless. If there is a glimmer of life, then pushing a handful of sales will drive up.

It is worth mentioning that, like The Genius Editor, "Me and Random House" was also translated by Peng Lun. Because of his precise translation, I was able to "get to know" Bennett at the beginning of my career and re-read it over the next dozen years. Through the establishment and development of Random House, Bennett demonstrated the wisdom and boldness of a publisher with a talent for business. He used his "cunning" and talent to participate in the construction of the golden age of American literature before and after World War II, just as Max used his editorial skills, his courage and wisdom, and his unremitting sense of responsibility to participate in the construction of this golden age.

In a sense, publishing is a frontier in the development of the spiritual culture of the times. Publishers in any country are like this, if there is no courage to be the first in the world in artistic exploration and realistic care, there is no open and inclusive mentality between different style trends and different personalities, and there is no liberal or even dare to make mistakes in the relevance of art and reality, it is difficult to have breakthrough achievements.

I couldn't help but think that if Max Perkins and Bennett Surf formed a publishing house, one as editor-in-chief and one as president, it would be "invincible". As for their charisma, perhaps Bennett's is more appealing, because his life credo is that "a little humor can make our lives energizing." And the epitaph he wrote for himself has always deeply touched me: "Whenever he walks into the room, people are always happier because of his arrival." In fact, reading his book is enough to make people laugh from beginning to end.

Compared to Max Perkins' attitude of "treating literature as life and death," I prefer Bennett Surf's approach. If Max Perkins can inspire us more of the "art" of editing, Bennett Surf's is almost the realm of the "Tao". The ultimate goal of publishing, or literature-related careers, is to make humanity more open and loose. For all people, finding happiness in their careers is as important as finding happiness in life.