by John Updike
Eliot was in his life a paradigm of modernism, a dutiful product of the nineteenth century who broke through his repressions with drumbeat, pastiche, and parody. Though critics still find much to fume at, his bare-bones, nearly transparent poetry will not go away; there will be no anthologies without him. His attempts to bring verse back onto the English stage are of irreducible literary interest, though perhaps they are better read than played. As a literary critic, he had the advantages of a superb ear and an outsider’s irreverence; his essays up to about 1935 contain more ideas, more energizing and clarifying insights into the classics of the English language than anything since. Twenty years have passed since his death, and his claims to privacy need no longer be rigorously respected. As Henry James rollingly wrote of the posthumous publication of Hawthorne’s journals:
These liberal excisions from the privacy of so reserved and shade-seeking a genius suggest forcibly the general question of the proper limits of curiosity as to that passive personality of an artist of which the elements are scattered in portfolios and table-drawers. It is becoming very plain, however, that whatever the proper limits may be, the actual limits will be fixed only by a total exhaustion of matter.
Goody Sergeant; the Powerful Katrinka; K.S.W.
ONWARD AND UPWARD: A Biography of Katharine S. White, by Linda H. Davis. 300 pp. Harper & Row, 1987.
Those of us who knew Katharine Sergeant White only relatively late in her life learn a lot from Onward and Upward. We learn that, as a young lady from Brookline attending Miss Winsor’s School in Boston, she was known as Goody Sergeant: an old classmate told her biographer, Linda H. Davis, “We called her Goody Sergeant behind her back, shortening it to Little Goody or simply Goody, because she was the goodest and the brightest in the class.” We learn that her first husband, the lawyer Ernest Angell, would sometimes call her, after she went to work for The New Yorker in 1925, Katrinka, referring to the comic-strip character the Powerful Katrinka—Ms. Davis reveals her own youth in supplying a footnote explaining Fontaine Fox’s “Toonerville Folks” as if few remain to remember that jaunty single-panel cartoon, with its rickety trolley car and highly comical figure of a super-strong woman. The nickname was bestowed, the biographer conjectures, with “perhaps some underlying resentment,” and indeed each partner of the impressive couple, in fourteen years of wedlock, had acquired reason to regard the other with mixed emotions. Divorce in 1929 was followed later the same year by Katharine’s marriage to E. B. White, and it was her second married name, with its forceful initials K.S.W. (attached to notes and memos in a hand of singular clarity and erectness), that she carried through most of her more than thirty-five years as an editor with The New Yorker.
To say that she took to her editorial work there like a duck to water would be an understatement, since heaven provides water whereas she to a marked degree had to create the element she prospered in. The magazine was six months old, predominantly humorous in content and masculine in personnel, and financially faltering when she was hired by its editor and founder, Harold Ross, as a first reader of manuscripts. Both she and he were thirty-two years old. Her two marriages to gifted and complex men come in for a good deal of scrutiny in Onward and Upward, but no less interesting, with its own veil of impenetrable privacy, was her professional mating with Harold Ross, a man as superficially coarse and bumptious as she was refined and dignified. It would appear that he needed her—her fierce Bryn Mawr education, her aristocratic sureness of taste, her instinctive courage and integrity—and she needed him; his almost inchoate energy and perfectionism created, in this fledgling weekly, an arena where, more than in any home, she felt important and active, useful and well compensated. She was hired for part-time work at twenty-five dollars a week; within two weeks she was working full-time at twice the salary. Women made Ross uncomfortable, and she would say that she “never felt any attraction to Ross as a male. In fact I couldn’t see how anybody could bear to be married to him, but we were fond of each other and had complete faith in each other. When he died I felt I had lost my best friend.” Mrs. White told her husband’s biographer, Scott Elledge (in a statement only partially quoted by Ms. Davis), “Ross was furious that I was a woman but he soon came to depend on me and accept me.” James Thurber, in his fanciful memoir, The Years with Ross, has the awed Ross say, of the then Mrs. Angell, “She knows the Bible, and literature, and foreign languages, and she has taste.” It was she who persuaded Ross to publish not just light verse but poetry, and, though she disavowed it, she is generally given credit for pushing the fiction in the direction of greater seriousness and scope. Not only was her advice sought on every kind of editorial question, but Raoul Fleischmann, The New Yorker’s owner, thanked her for helping form policy on advertising:
Being a sensitive, cultured New Englander, imbued with the fine conscience characteristic of that famed rock-ribbed area, you had strong feelings involving honesty, decency and believability in the advertising we should accept, and you got Harold seriously interested. In spite of a few fumbles at the outset, when we got a bit educated, [we] were all for your ideas, and it evolved that our current acceptance of advertising is based solidly on certain musts and must-nots.
E. B. White thought that his wife and Ross “met at one point (they both thought the same things were funny).” Another point, surely, was the ethical ardor they both brought, from such different backgrounds and temperaments, to the business of getting out a weekly magazine.
Her determination to have a career was unusual but long-held: “I can hardly remember a time in my childhood, absurd a child as I must sound to admit it, when my plans for myself ‘grown-up’ did not include both marriage and a definite career.” She wrote this in an essay of 1926, “Home and Office,” addressing feminist issues that, sixty years later, are more alive than ever. “If honest, I must admit to a distinct personal ambition that is thwarted and an underlying cause for unhappiness when I cannot do the work of mind, not hands, for which I am best fitted.” Katharine was the youngest of three daughters born to Charles Spencer Sergeant, the son of a grain merchant from Northampton, Massachusetts, and Elizabeth (“Bessie”) Blake Shepley Sergeant, from Naples, Maine. The Sergeant side, especially, held a number of educated and independent-minded women; four of Charles Sergeant’s five sisters remained single, and two became teachers following their graduation from Smith. As she approached the age of seventy, Katharine saluted, in one of her gardening essays, “my New England aunts … who cultivated their own gardens, and who had strong opinions on Rights for Women.” On her mother’s side, there was the redoubtable “Aunt Poo,” an artist who, at the age of fifty-one, married a thirty-year-old Japanese, Hyozo Omori, and, after his untimely death, lived in Japan, translating Lady Murasaki and performing so heroically in the great earthquake of 1923 that she was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun. Katharine’s older sister Elsie became a writer, and an uneasy rivalry between the two lasted until Elsie’s death in 1965. Katharine followed her to Bryn Mawr, whose president, Martha Carey Thomas, the second woman in the world to receive a doctorate of philosophy (she had to go to Zurich to get it), urged a life of “intellectual renunciation” upon her students, and supervised a rigorous, classical education as free as possible from male distraction: “It is undesirable to have the problems of love and marriage presented for decision to a young girl during the four years when she ought to devote her energies to profiting by the only systematic intellectual training she is likely to receive during her life.” Even if she were so ill-advised as to marry, the Bryn Mawr graduate should ideally be “both economically and psychologically independent” from her husband.
Some other factors possibly contributed to Katharine Sergeant’s habit of independence and personal achievement. No brother was present in the Sergeant household, to hand the girls a second fiddle. Bosomy, unambitious Bessie Sergeant died, of maltreated appendicitis, when her youngest daughter was only six, so that Charles Sergeant thenceforth raised the girls in company with his sister,
“Aunt Crully,” an eloquent Smith graduate and former headmistress. Katharine went off to Miss Winsor’s seventh grade well read and instructed, if (Ms. Davis suggests) insufficiently cuddled. Also, early in her marriage to Ernest Angell, when their infant daughter was not quite a year old, he enlisted in the Army and was not discharged until twenty-two months later—“Your grandfather was overseas longer than almost anybody I knew,” Katharine would write to her granddaughter Callie Angell, with a rhythm as of relived pain. He came back decorated, debauched (“Soldiers who went to France, as your grandfather Angell did,” Katharine wrote to Callie, “came back with the French idea that a wife and a mistress was the way to live”), and determined to leave Cleveland, where he had been raised and had joined his father’s law firm. They came to New York, which suited his wife fine. In most of the years before she was hired by Ross, she had managed to find jobs, paid or volunteer—interviewing patients at Massachusetts General Hospital, conducting a door-to-door survey of handicapped people in Cleveland, lobbying for worker-protection laws, reading to children at Boston’s Children’s Hospital (this medical emphasis was perhaps related to her mother’s painful and needless early death and certainly to her own notorious and uninhibited lifelong fascination with matters of health), raising money for Bryn Mawr, writing articles for The New Republic when she accompanied Ernest to Hispaniola, running errands for a decorator friend in Sneden’s Landing. She was a doer. While in Nevada for three months, to obtain her divorce, she got involved in ranch life and round-ups to the extent of getting kicked by a horse—“a distinction,” she wrote E. B. White, “of which I’m a trifle vain.”
By the terms of the agreement, custody was joint. Nancy Angell, twelve, and Roger, nine, were to spend weekdays with their father and weekends, holidays, and summer vacations with their mother. Since she had a full-time job and the divorce, however provoked, was her desire, and since no account implies that Ernest Angell was anything less than a loving father, this might seem a civilized and enlightened arrangement; but, Ms. Davis tells us, without any corroborating quotation, “Katharine suffered terrible guilt feelings about the custody arrangement the rest of her life.” This is but one of numerous places where the biographer, with surprising sharpness, ascribes guilt feelings to her subject or in her own voice criticizes her. Katharine was extravagant, she insists: she employed too many servants, refused to do housework and was “nearly incapable in the kitchen,” bought the best for herself in clothes, and took the “opulent” Twentieth-Century Limited to Reno, where she stayed in “the town’s new luxury hotel” and “put up at a ranch, the costlier way to wait out a divorce.” As a person, we are told, she was unconfiding, hypochondriacal, relatively insensitive “to human needs and complexities,” sometimes brusque and formidable, and work-centered. She trysted with E. B. White in Saint-Tropez and Corsica while still married to Ernest Angell, yet “always vigorously denied that Andy had had anything to do with the break-up of her marriage” and “was never comfortable … with the circumstances of her divorce.” Well, we want at times to ask, so what? Nothing is obtained for nothing, and if her passionate involvement with The New Yorker sometimes detracted from her domestic performance, we can scarcely be as shocked as seems Ms. Davis, who in the course of writing this biography herself married and bore two children and was perhaps exceptionally sensitive to familial responsibilities. If Katharine Sergeant had heeded Carey Thomas’s Amazonian advice, she wouldn’t have married at all; when she confided to a classmate that she was engaged, her fellow Bryn Mawrtyr spontaneously exclaimed, “Oh, Katharine, how perfectly awful!”
In fact, what emerges from Onward and Upward, and from E. B. White’s passing sketches of his wife in One Man’s Meat and elsewhere, and from the overflowing letters of K.S.W.’s later years, and from the memories of most who knew her even slightly, is how much warmth she did convey, above and beyond as well as within her editorial duties. Her good humor and resilience were as conspicuous as her dignity and (when provoked) her hauteur. Not all of Ms. Davis’s psychologizing takes the form of stricture; some of it is appraisal, and feels quite just:
Katharine White’s was a deeply private nature, her life, essentially creative. Much of her time was spent alone in a room—reading, writing, and editing. Her personality is perhaps finally understood in this context: as one who needed this kind of solitary activity, and consequently more replenishment than the ordinary person needs from the world outside.
Her creativity expressed itself not only in her own slight, though confident and lively, literary output, but in her endless editing. To the born editor, it must be, the mass of manuscripts looms as nature and experience do to the writer—as a superabundance to be selected from, and refined, and made shapely and meaningful. The attentive editor shapes, or at least pats, the writers. Katharine Angell’s jobs before 1925 were almost all social work, of a sort; she liked to deal with people, on the terms work provided. “In her contact with writers, whom she endlessly reassured, counseled, encouraged, and comforted, and to whom she was always available, Katharine was essentially maternal; paradoxically, she was unable to mother her own children. She was compelled to express her maternity by leaving her family, as, years earlier, she had left Nancy in the care of a nurse so that she could do volunteer work with children.… Editing gave her the distance she required while simultaneously allowing her to free her abundant warmth and gregariousness.” While her three children, who are all alive and well, might dispute the down side of this analysis, few of her innumerable correspondents could deny that “Katharine White’s letters give no indication of her formidableness: one who knew her only through her letters would find there a freer and more openly affectionate person than the woman others knew in life.”
Though she was able to deal affably with such prickly male authors as John O’Hara and Vladimir Nabokov, female writers like Jean Stafford and Mary McCarthy elicited her least guarded epistolary affection, making up, perhaps, for a lack she once confided in a letter to her husband: “All I need is a woman friend or two which seems to be my great NYC lack.” Faith McNulty is quoted to the effect that the “impression of strength” Mrs. White gave may have tended to isolate her: “I suspect that she did a lot of understanding of other people who leaned on her in various ways, but she looked so capable that it would not occur to one that she might need any sort of support.”
She did not lack, in the second half of her life, for loyalty and love from her husband, nor for family bustle, nor for grandchildren (nine) and, toward the end, great-grandchildren (six). Ms. Davis paints an engaging picture of the North Brooklin matriarch as she tries to impart to her proliferating descendants the severity of Maine’s anti-marijuana laws and such old-fashioned customs as plum pudding for Christmas and dressing up for dinner. Her own girlhood, with its soft Brookline lawn and its summers of gathering water lilies by canoe on Lake Chocorua, returned in glowing paragraphs in her discursive, erudite gardening essays, posthumously collected in a lovely book that is sadly shy of its intended last chapter, about the gardens of her childhood, which her declining health didn’t allow her to write. From almost the day of her retirement in 1961, her body was beset by a series of mishaps and illnesses: falls, faints, fears of a brain tumor, a blocked carotid artery that was misdiagnosed for eight months, and—most lastingly, painfully, humiliatingly, and expensively—a rare skin disease, subcorneal pustular dermatosis, which in its worst phases shed her skin like a snake’s and precluded all but the lightest clothing. Cortisone side effects, shingles, a fractured vertebra, a kidney infection, osteoporosis, diabetes, failing vision, and congestive heart failure added to her Job-like plague of complaints, about which she was frank and animated—“I slop about all ungirdled and wearing loose cotton”—in the letters that she pushed out through the haze of drugs, often dictating and then emending in her shaky hand. She struggled on bravely to the age of eighty-four; though she was famous for her hypochondria, no one could quarrel with her last recorded words: “I’m sick.”�
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Linda Davis deserves our gratitude for bringing Katharine White back to life—for placing her career as woman and editor in perspective, for eliciting interviews from living witnesses of this career, for putting into print the subject’s written views of herself, and for publishing such a delectable array of photographs, including the striking, rather melancholy near-profile of Katharine Angell used on the jacket. Her handsome looks were not those of a typical thin-skinned New Englander; there was something exotic—Latin, or even Middle Eastern—about the thick hair pulled back in a big bun, the hook nose, the heavy lids and shadowed gray (not blue, as Brendan Gill to her vexation claimed in his Here at The New Yorker) eyes. Fortune in 1934 described her as “hard, suave, ambitious,” and the suavity was there, the photographs, and an elegant caricature by Peter Arno, remind us.
Ms. Davis began this book as her master’s thesis, and the many facts she had to marshal come on a bit jumpily. Her information, especially in the first chapters, seems crowded and scattered—we would like to know more, for instance, of Elsie Sergeant’s writing and history of publication, and how Ernest Angell, having been “energetically, audaciously unfaithful,” could have been so hurt and angry when Katharine decided to leave him. I have never before read a book-length biography in which the subject’s date of birth is not given and even the year left somewhat ambiguous. Ms. Davis says “Katharine had been married only nineteen months when … she became pregnant with her first child”; in fact, Nancy, her first child, was born nineteen months after the wedding. The biography speaks of the Algonquin Hotel as being, in relation to The New Yorker office building, “conveniently located in the next block” when in truth, if you leave by the 44th Street entrance, as anyone would, it’s the same block. “Lady Murasaki” is the name not of a book but of an author.§ An occasion is described as dinner that I remember as lunch, having been there. And no doubt more nits could be picked, by those who know.