Amy Reading is a writer and editor whose first book, “The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge and a Small History of the Big Con,” covered J. Frank Norfleet, a Texas rancher who in 1919 lost everything he had in a stock market swindle and subsequently set out to outcon the men who had conned him. Now, she turns her eye to Katharine Sergeant White, The New Yorker’s first fiction editor, in “The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker.” White walked into The New Yorker in 1925, when the magazine was only a few months old, and left with a job as an editor. Over the next 36 years, she would help build the magazine’s prestigious legacy, transforming the publication into what it is today while also reshaping the 20th century literary landscape for women. Along with editing the likes of John Updike and Vladimir Nabokov, she cultivated a community of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker: Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer and more. “The World She Edited” was published in September, and Reading speaks at the Harvard Book Store on Friday. We interviewed her Friday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
When and how did you find out about Katharine S. White?
In 2017, I came across an essay about her relationship with Jean Stafford, a short story writer and novelist, and I found it incredibly moving. It was about how White brought Stafford back to her writing life after a series of personal interruptions. After recovering from her very violent, upsetting marriage to the poet Robert Lowell – which included checking herself into a Manhattan hospital for detox and a mental health breakdown, where she stayed for almost a year – she was trying to get back into writing, and she wrote a story called “Children Are Bored on Sunday.” Katharine loved it and accepted it, and it began this decadeslong partnership between the two of them, with Katharine becoming Jean’s most trusted reader and being incredibly receptive to her work. Reading about them made me ache for that kind of an editor, for that kind of relationship where my best work would be elicited from me by someone right there with me inside that work. I’m sure many, many writers can empathize with that feeling. So from there, I began to read more about Katharine and realized that she had that relationship with many people, including many women, and that there was an art to her editing that went far beyond just marking up a manuscript. That’s what intrigued me, and then it opened up this whole world into her influence on The New Yorker and her influence on 20th century literature as a whole.
How would you describe that influence, and especially the impact on women writers of the time?
The New Yorker, as has been observed by other commentators and historians, was extraordinary in its time. It was started in 1925 and it was extraordinary because it published men and women in equal numbers from the beginning. But you would have to really peer to see that, because for decades, The New Yorker did not have a table of contents, and it listed its authors at the end of stories and articles. In other words, it didn’t present the names of the authors, it presented the pieces themselves, and so the pieces were therefore not gendered. But if you read a little closer, what you see is that there were quite a lot of pieces that were specifically addressed to women just like Katharine. These were women of the 1920s who were educated, well-off, urban, engaged in the issues of the day; many of them were married but without children and with a certain amount of disposable income, and those who weren’t married were seeking companionate marriages. Postsuffrage, they were seeking equality in public life, and this is the readership that Katharine understood because she was part of it. This is the readership to whom she edited, to whom she was issuing out these stories and poems and memoirs and reminiscences. She was really acquiring and editing pieces for herself and her cohort. When you peer even closer, when you take Katharine White as the frame (what I call in the book reading over her shoulder), you see that there are ways that her life experience is influencing what she’s drawn to and how she understands her cohort and their place in the culture. I began to see, for instance, how many stories about disillusionment in love and in marriage she was publishing, because she herself was married to her high school sweetheart, Ernest Angell, and they had a very rough marriage and divorced in 1929. Then she married, more famously, her second husband, E.B. white, whom she had a very close, intimate, loving partnership with. But she dealt with her first husband all her life because they shared two children, and that experience really shaped how she thought about marriage and love and what it meant to be an educated woman seeking equality within the intimate relationship of marriage. That percolates through dozens, maybe hundreds, of the stories she published. And so when you read the life and the work, you begin to see how much they influence one another, and how much she’s understanding herself as part of a set of larger sociological trends.
How did you conduct your research?
I did two main kinds of research, archival and interviews. Katharine, toward the end of her life, spent enormous energy collecting her own archive of letters and papers, which she donated to her alma mater, Bryn Mawr College, so that was where I started. The other enormous archive was The New Yorker papers at the New York Public Library, which is practically bottomless and contains all of her work, including her editorial letters to authors, which were my primary source material. She did nothing but write and dictate letters all day long for 36 years, and I could see the evolution of her relationships with writers and the development of specific stories or specific poems over time. The second kind of research that I did was interviews, and I was very fortunate to get to know her son Roger Angell quite well. When I first met him, he was 98 or 99 years old. He was born in 1920, and his memory was phenomenal, just sterling, and I began to interview him, but then it became more of a friendship. He was extraordinarily generous with his memories and with his personal archive, which included hundreds of letters between his mother and him. It started with a letter he wrote when he was 8 years old while she was in Reno getting divorced from his father, and ended with the very last letter he wrote to her when she was at the end of her life. She had learned that she was going blind, and he wrote a letter to her assuring her that he and others in their family would always read to her and make sure she never lost the written word, which was, of course, her passion. And everything in between! I also got to meet and interview other family members, like her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter, and that was wonderful. Getting to befriend and really come to like and love her descendants was not something I was expecting.
The other unexpected finding was this one story in Katharine’s life that I had no idea about. It was not written anywhere else, but I was able to find out a fair bit about it and it turned out to be one of the main sources of her disillusionment with her first husband, Angell. He had many affairs and broke her heart, and she tried very hard to make their marriage work. He wanted their marriage to work, too, but as an open marriage, which she absolutely did not want. What I discovered was that he had a family on the side. He had a woman that he was sleeping with, and she had a child whom he supported loosely. This son was born less than a year after his son with Katharine, Roger, was born, and this monumental betrayal was a secret to many people in the family for decades. In fact, I was never able to learn whether Katharine knew about the son or not. She definitely knew about the mistress, but I don’t know if she knew that this friend of her son Roger was actually the son of her husband.
Why did you choose this birth-to-death style of biography, as opposed to a narrower look at her time at the New Yorker? Did you consider other formats?
This book started out much more narrow. First it was going to be about Katharine White and Jean Stafford only, and my agent said, this is lovely, but she had so many other relationships too, and I think readers would want to know about those. So my next proposal was for a book about six of the relationships Katharine had with different authors, one chapter for each author, and my agent said, this is better, but I think it will leave readers hungry for the whole story. She pulled me into the biography genre and she convinced me that there was a larger story about Katharine’s life that explained her career. Even then I wasn’t wedded to the cradle-to-grave version of biography. The book that I pitched to editors would have started with Katharine going to college at Bryn Mawr in the 1910s. I wasn’t going to do much about her childhood or her ancestors, not thinking that was important. But as I researched her, I saw how much it explained about her, and that it was a very important part of the story, especially if, as was important to me, I wanted to make visible her whiteness and what she inherited from her New England forebears in Maine and in Massachusetts. What I experienced was a desire to write a biography in a different way, followed by the subject prompting me to write it in a more conventional way because that conventional way matched her life. At first it was my agent, and then it was Katharine herself who kind of called out for me what this book needed to be, and then also, the overabundance of primary material about her meant there was more than enough. This could have easily been twice the length it is, and it’s already a sizable 500 pages.
White “reinvented the role of editor,” as you say, transforming the relationship to go beyond the bounds of work. What do you think writers and editors today can learn from White?
Well, I’ll start by saying Katharine’s style of editing was based on the needs of the magazine. She joined the New Yorker in 1925, a few months after it was founded, when it was a very ragtag operation. It was on the brink of failure, and she walked in and invented her job. In the early years, she did almost everything. Other people did too, but she was editing across all genres and departments of the magazine, she was weighing in on advertising, she was sitting in on all the art meetings where they decided the covers and the cartoons, she was considering paper-stock options. She really did help to create the institution from the ground up. The important point about The New Yorker at this time was that it had no money, so they couldn’t afford the well-known authors of the day. You will not find F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway in the pages of the magazine, but what you will find is a bunch of writers who later became well-known because of their work in The New Yorker, because Katharine found them in the slush pile. Her job was to read the mail every day, wading through the hundreds of submissions, and then cultivate the writers that she thought had promise. That meant carrying on conversations with them across dozens of letters for weeks or months at a time until they would produce something that she could publish. Then, she would keep after them for more material. Over the years, she learned how to get good writing from people, and mainly women, whose lives she understood very well. She knew what it meant to be a housewife who had no job outside the home, even if they had a college education, but wanted to write, and she figured out the structures and the incentives that women would need to do it. She looked at women’s lives and worked with them to create their writing lives.
The other thing she did was talk to her writers about her own life. She wrote long letters where she shared details about her life, establishing herself to writers not as this imposing dragon of a gatekeeper at The New Yorker, but as a sympathetic human being who understood them. She affirmed and bolstered writers as they were struggling with divorces, mental or physical illnesses, the stresses of childrearing. She knew about all of those things, and she could talk to them about her experiences and the experiences of those she knew. She had a name for this: She called it the personal editorial letter. She taught it to other editors at The New Yorker, most famously William Maxwell, whom she hired in 1936 and taught to operate the same way. I’m not in any way an expert on The New Yorker after 1961, so I don’t know how much of that is still practiced, but it’s certainly not something I’ve experienced in my writing life. The best aspect of the relationships Katharine cultivated, I think, was the fact that they meant that writers felt secure enough to send her drafts that might not have been fantastic yet. They felt secure enough to take risks because they knew that they were going to find a receptive reader on the other side of the line. I think this is something we’re missing today, especially with the sheer volume of writing being produced and the lack of outlets for good writing. It makes a difference when you’re sure that the person reading your work has the goal of amplifying it, of helping you get it better, rather than tossing it aside with an impersonal no, this doesn’t meet our needs at this time. That’s what she gave again and again and, man, I wish there were more of that nowadays.
Amy Reading reads from “The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker” at 7 p.m. at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free.
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