Editing Without Ego: How Katharine S. White Quietly Shaped The New Yorker’s Writers

Katharine S. White wanted to remain invisible. She had a horror of seeming egotistical or self-promoting, but even more than that, she believed her work belonged in the background. Her husband, E.B. White, was the writer whose beloved books caused readers to flood their Maine farmhouse with tidal waves of letters. Her work, as the editor of The New Yorker, was meant to be undetectable, and never struck her as artistic, creative, or worthy of scrutiny.

So perhaps one reason why she was a superb editor is because her personality so completely concorded with the wider cultural understanding of editing as belonging off-stage. And yet that view is entirely incorrect.

White invented her own job at The New Yorker when she joined the magazine a few months after Harold Ross founded it in 1925, and a magnificent portion of the magazine’s success came from the way she defined the job of editor, a job she held until her retirement in 1961. The New Yorker had no money to pay the famous authors of the 1920s—Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were too rich for their blood—so she read every poem, cartoon, and short story in the slush pile, sifting the dross and finding authors to cultivate, via letters and lunches at the Algonquin, over months and years.

By the 1930s, The New Yorker was profitable while other magazines folded, and suddenly they had to find ways to keep their stable of authors from being poached by the competition. But note the terms of this success story: money, profit, competition.

Our eagerness to overlook the editor comes from our uneasiness with the status of literature in a capitalist society. As Lewis Hyde theorizes it, “works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy.” A gift has worth; a commodity has a price.

The editor is the guardian between the two realms. If the writer—that sacred mad genius alone up there in the garret, unloosing a poem from a deep wellspring of inspiration—represents the Romantic conception of art, the editor can only ever be a figure of compromise and debasement, the one who cuts the artist down to size to fit him into the commercial realm, where art can be bolstered by advertising, consumed by the masses, and made to profit the corporation.

If, instead, we begin from the premise that all art is collaborative, then we can figure the editor as also an artist and begin to see the practice and methodology of editing in its own right.

“Dear Katharine, I must sit down and write you now while the dream I woke from this clear autumn morning is still fresh,” wrote the poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton to White in October 1960.

I dreamed that for some unknown reason you had given me a magic purse full of all sorts of sweet things in special pockets….I wish I could remember all the little things that were in this purse, all I do remember is that in the coin purse you had put something terribly wonderful instead of money, and I thought “what a genius she is!”

The editor too can be a genius. This passage encodes absolutely everything about White’s relationships to the writers she edited at The New Yorker. First of all, she was their intimate, a deeply caring and sensitive friend through editing sessions in her midtown office, visits at their homes or hers, and lengthy, detailed letters—so much an influence that Sarton could find White there in her subconscious.

But notice too that as the gatekeeper for one of the most influential magazines of the twentieth century, White was hardly a dragon. Instead of compromising Sarton as an artist, taking something away from her writing, Katharine is a giver of gifts, a possessor of magic, a generous friend whose bestowals are valued entirely outside of the capitalist marketplace.

White edited according to a set of principles that she never wrote down but that structured her entire career, and the careers of the writers she cultivated. She was lavish with her rejections—both in the sense that she handed them out freely, and that she was generous in always giving a detailed reason for turning down a piece.

She made abundantly clear that she was rejecting a given poem or story, not the writer herself. Though her office was awash in manuscripts from the slush pile, she assiduously followed up on each of “her” authors, writing to them to encourage them to submit if she hadn’t heard from them in a while, even sending them ideas for stories.

But she never suggested other writers to emulate or tried to nudge one writer to be like another. She prided herself on giving unwavering support and encouraging her writers to submit work even as they dealt with divorce, illness, institutionalization. She herself worked from hospital beds through her many surgeries and ailments, so she had no problem sending page proofs to Elizabeth Hardwick in the hospital just days after giving birth to her daughter Harriet.

Katharine advanced her authors money, sent them books, introduced them to each other, introduced them to their future husbands, turned dry spells into rushing rivers, suggested now-classic stories and essays. In one instance, she inquired about getting a divorced poet an annulment so she could marry her Catholic fiancé—the editor as a full-service consultant for all writers’ troubles.

White called out the best from her authors through her relentless attention to them—her criticism was her love language. As she wrote to one potential contributor from whom she asked for major revisions, “your story is too good not to have it perfect.”

Elevating Katharine S. White to the rarified club of genius editors, though, changes the meaning of that term. Ezra Pound famously chopped T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in half. Maxwell Perkins has become known, in A. Scott Berg’s biography and the subsequent feature film, as the mastermind behind Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.

Gordon Lish is notorious for turning Raymond Carver into a minimalist by ruthlessly slicing down his stories—some by as much as seventy percent—thereby imposing his own aesthetic on Carver. Michael Pietsch transmuted David Foster Wallace’s tottering pile of unfinished manuscript pages into The Pale King.

Adding White to this list instantly shows up these editorial acts for what they are: heroic, even melodramatic acts of co-creation. Setting aside the thorny questions of ethics and consent, they represent extreme editing, the kind that leaves such a stark trail through the archives that it becomes visible, narratable, even filmic.

But these instances are the exception to the rule, not its apotheosis. White’s legacy is three and a half decades of unremarkable, steady, subtle receptivity and reciprocity.

Long after White’s death, Mary McCarthy remembered working with her. They had

an almost unvarying ritual. We would meet for lunch at the Algonquin (she took me). I think we both took martinis but I’m not sure. After lunch we would go up to her office and work—for the rest of the afternoon, generally….[T]he work was always finished in a single sitting with Katharine often rising to consult the big Webster on the lectern in her office.

McCarthy loved getting into the specifics of prose with White, what she called hovering over the details.

Katharine believed, as I did, that “grey” with an “a” or an “e” depended on what shade one meant. We both thought ‘grey’ was lighter; The New Yorker preferred a uniform ‘gray.’ We amused ourselves over such points; as you can guess, for me she was the ideal editor since we were of a common mind on many things.

McCarthy and White initially met during a particular gray period of McCarthy’s life, when her marriage to Edmund Wilson was in trouble. White bought her story, “The Weeds,” about a young woman with a beloved country house and garden which she deserts when she leaves her husband, only to be dragged back to him and the overgrown garden. White could relate, having left her own first husband and ceding their country house and garden to him—and soon, so could McCarthy, who left Wilson, but was pulled back to him just as the New Yorker issue with her story hit the newsstands.

The story ultimately succeeded in ending their marriage. “The Weeds” was the magazine’s longest story to date, and paved the way for other ambitious works of fiction, as well as a lifelong friendship between White and McCarthy based on their shared interest in words and gardens.

And, of course, adding White to pantheon of important editors instantly raises the issue of gender. Katharine termed her method of relating to authors  “the personal-editorial letter,” in which she shared details of her current life, or stories from her past if they related to a piece under consideration.

It was intimacy with a point—to turn the editor/writer relationship into one of reciprocity, so that the writer would feel caught and held by a real and subtle person whose tastes arose from a rich history of reading and living. Katharine—and many others since her—figured this style as feminine, even in the same breath that she acknowledged its widespread use.

Toward the end of her life, Katharine reminisced with her protégé, William Maxwell: “As mother hen of the Fiction Dept. the personal-editorial letter was a habit I tried to instill in everyone. It’s a New Yorker method I’ve always been proud of and it is rare among magazines.” Maxwell wrote personal-editorial letters, and so did Katharine’s son, New Yorker editor Roger Angell.

Katharine White’s legacy is relatively easy to resuscitate, but the fact that she has been ignored for so long should make us wonder about the women whose work has been even more profoundly neglected. For too long Blanche Knopf remained in the shadow of her husband, Alfred A. Knopf, but now that she has her own biography, we should turn our attention to Judith Jones, Blanche’s assistant who rose to be senior editor and Vice President, the champion of Julia Child, John Updike, Anne Tyler, and Langston Hughes.

The publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman should make us curious about Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff at Lippincott, the one responsible for turning Watchman into To Kill a Mockingbird. Martha Foley began Story magazine with her husband and then took over Edward O’Brien’s periodical, Best American Short Stories. We’ve just lost Betty Prashker, who edited woman spanning the feminist spectrum from Kate Millett to Judith Krantz.

We should pay acute attention to the editors of women’s magazines who published some of the twentieth century’s most important writers, far before men’s magazines like Esquire and GQ took over. Some of White’s fiercest competition for writers came from Carmel Snow’s Harper’s Bazaar and Betsy Talbot Blackwell’s Mademoiselle.

Blackwell published William Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Penn Warren. Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates all made their literary debuts at Mademoiselle. Blackwell started their famous guest editing program and hired Sylvia Plath—who transmuted her experience into The Bell Jar—as well as Joan Didion, Ann Beattie, and dozens of other women.

Black female editors have been triply eclipsed in literary history, by gender, race, and also by artistic practice, since many of them were also writers whose novels have pushed their editorial work to the sidelines. Pauline E. Hopkins wrote short stories and novels, and was also the editor of the Colored American’s Magazine, the first Black monthly magazine. Jessie Redmon Fauset, largely known now as the writer of Plum Bun, was also the literary editor of The Crisis and an important shaper of the Harlem Renaissance.

And we’ve yet to fully encompass the monumental cultural contributions of Toni Morrison, who was a fiction editor at Random House from 1967 to 1983.

If, like May Sarton, we think of Katharine White’s editorial memos as gifts she dispensed to her writers, then another property of gift exchange can tell us where to train our eyes. Lewis Hyde writes that when a gift is circulated from person to person, “it becomes the binder of many wills” and “an agent of social cohesion.” How did White’s letters create and bind a community of writers, men and women, whose interactions amplified their work in ways we haven’t yet noticed?

If we think of an editor as a social connector sitting at the center of a network, and the writers at her fingertips as a cohort, we can perhaps align writers who we have not previously seen as connected. When we read over the shoulder of an influential editor, everything about literary history changes and shifts in the new light.

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The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker by Amy Reading is available via Mariner Books.