About Wolfe and Perkins, ‘Genius’ none too smart of a movie

The directors and cast of the new movie “Genius” deserve an A-plus for a bold attempt to film the unfilmable – the elusive process of book editing and its peculiar relationships. As some early reviewers have noted, the attempt to impart dramatic color and tension to a literary collaboration – whose essence is the transformation of written drafts into books – may have been fore-doomed. Failure or not, however, the movie is of keen interest here in North Carolina as a personality study of our most famous novelist, Thomas Wolfe of Asheville.

I am among the Wolfe fans who eagerly awaited the movie. In my youth, I followed Wolfe as my literary hero to Chapel Hill (“Pulpit Hill” as he calls it in his fiction) and, drunk on his high-calorie prose, wrote bad pieces about him in the student paper, the Daily Tar Heel, which he had once edited.

“Genius” boils Scott Berg’s biography of the great editor Maxwell Perkins into an interactive threesome, focused not only on Wolfe and Perkins but on Wolfe’s New York lover, the theatrical set designer Aline Bernstein, who was almost old enough to be his mother. She appears, with substantial exaggeration, as a jealous and suicidal hysteric who even threatens to shoot Perkins – or herself. Perkins, editor in chief at the firm of Scribner’s, also edited Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and other distinguished authors. He is depicted as a kind but starchy Yankee who never removes his hat, even at the family dinner table. His familiarity with jazz, even in the Jazz Age, is nil. That such eccentricities may be true to Perkins is beside the point, since their intended dramatic function is unclear.

As for Jude Law’s loquacious Thomas Wolfe, the word is “embarrassing.” Wolfe was indeed tall, ambitious and prolific, a heavy drinker and big talker. But he was a serious artist and teacher (at NYU) and hardly the noisy, egotistical bumpkin Law suggests.

The most glaring shortfall of “Genius,” however, is that it turns a famous literary tragedy, typical of the cruelties of literary politics, into vapid sentimentality. It shows Wolfe breaking his filial tie with Perkins in adolescent pique, implausibly sharpened by Wolfe’s insulting taunt that Perkins is a frustrated novelist who takes out his frustrations on his writers and who promotes second-rate talents like Hemingway and Fitzgerald!

In fact, Wolfe’s break with Perkins in the mid-1930s, at the peak of his fame and two years before he died, was precipitated by the jeers of petty critics who took a cue from Wolfe’s naive candor and accused him of artlessness and dependency. Wolfe had given an account of the writing of his second novel, “Of Time and the River,” published as “The Story of a Novel.” He said that Perkins had to tell him when the novel was finished and to stop writing – an unwise revelation that is amplified in the movie. That there was half-truth in the critical taunts, to which Wolfe was naturally sensitive, proves that half-truth in what claims to be “a true story” can be as misleading as outright fiction.

The movie punctuates a complex and riveting tale of writer-editor camaraderie with an episode of puerile caprice. It leaves Perkins so distraught that he removes his hat for the only time and weeps over Wolfe’s farewell letter, an adaptation from a familiar passage in Wolfe’s last novel, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” The British actor Colin Firth has demonstrated his own genius in such films as “The King’s Speech,” but as Maxwell Perkins he is stifled by a brief and unimaginative script.

By all means see “Genius” for its cinematic daring and occasional highlights. But those who seek the full story of the Wolfe-Perkins collaboration must look elsewhere – perhaps print. David Donald’s fine biography “Look Homeward” is a good place to start.

This story was originally published June 24, 2016 at 5:35 PM with the headline "About Wolfe and Perkins, ‘Genius’ none too smart of a movie."