Odd Jobs (142 page)

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.”
^‡

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.

However, I liked and admired the biography’s overall organization, in rather sweeping topical chapters that lift us above the plod of years, and the biographer’s lack of timidity in dealing with her subject. She expresses her own literary opinions firmly (“Katharine … was blind to the strongest virtues in her own writing”), speculates boldly upon the thorny and delicate issues of Katharine’s mothering, wiving, and formidability, and draws as close to the dead woman as she can, detailing her diseases and sleeping habits and cuticle-picking and even sharing with us what the Whites thought was the right amount of married sex (once or twice a week). Katharine White no doubt would have deplored some of these revelations. She scorned publicity, not out of shame but in aesthetic distaste. When, in 1937, she was invited to be included in a book called
Women of Achievement
, she declined, saying, “I can’t see any reason for such a book, other than to satisfy the vanity of the ladies described in
it.” She and Ross agreed in regarding their magazine’s workings as a purely private matter; gossipy books by
New Yorker
insiders like Thurber and Gill, as they began to be published, gave her pain, benign though they generally were. Yet the truth-seeking spirit of
Onward and Upward
, even where the tone turns combative and carping, is surely the right and worthy one, and one suited to its honest, industrious, selflessly engaged subject.

Katharine White’s achievements—“the best woman editor in the world,” Janet Flanner called her—were by the nature of editorial work largely invisible; an editor is like an actor or actress in that the performance leaves its traces mostly in hearsay and memory. The satisfaction Mrs. White took in her work focused on the product and did not ask that she herself be made widely visible. Still, it is nice to see her here, from little beribboned bookworm to infirm great-grandmother; her life offers a model, in its stresses as well as its surmountings, for the many women now who bravely try to combine a full career with a full womanliness.

D
OROTHY
P
ARKER:
What Fresh Hell Is This?
, by Marion Meade. 459 pp. Villard, 1988.

It is hard to know what made reading this biography as enjoyable as it was, since the writing is shoddy, the mood sour, and the subject rather resolutely unsympathetic. Perhaps in my case it was a teen-age infatuation with the Algonquin Round Table, or what I imagined of it with the help of the late Bennett Cerf, who used to compile books of jokes (e.g.,
Try and Stop Me
and
Shake Well Before Using
) that drew heavily upon the alleged ripostes and verbal barbs of Mrs. Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Heywood Broun, and other “celebrated wits” of the Twenties, who, legend assured me, liked nothing better than to have lunch together at their own special table at the Algonquin Hotel and endlessly bask in one another’s banter. That such an angelic assembly, glorying in its own pure being, objectively existed seemed proved by a fallout of
books that reached us provincial mortals—Mrs. Parker’s slim volumes of poems and short stories, F.P.A.’s copious verse and anthologies, and, above all, the humorous essays of Robert Benchley, packaged under such saucy labels as
My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew
and
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or David Copperfield
. The very titles bring back the sickly-yellow, pencil-gouged look of the old oaken high-school library tables where, trying to stifle my laughter lest I become known as a discipline problem, I used to read Benchley’s collections, with their tidy illustrations by Gluyas Williams. It is fascinating, if a bit drearily so, to learn now, from Ms. Meade’s book, that Benchley, the epitome in print of hilarious innocence, who never penned a word that stirred a licentious shadow in an adolescent’s mind, was in his personal, New York life a priapic demon. Having settled his wife with a “Victorian divorce” in Scarsdale, he kept his own kimono at Polly Adler’s brothel and “played backgammon with the madame for the services of her women.” Outside the whorehouse walls, “the wife of a well-known banker was so eager to continue sleeping with him that she once crawled through the transom of his room at the Royalton Hotel,” and he was praised for his phallic grandeur by no less a connoisseuse than Tallulah Bankhead. Nor were the other Round Table regulars models of monogamy:

Coffee, however, was not this crowd’s beverage of choice; the Algonquin circle brimmed with alcohol. Heywood Broun “had a habit of fueling himself all day long from his hip flask.” Charles MacArthur, soon after he arrived from Chicago in 1922, “was putting away a quart of Scotch every night.” Benchley and Mrs. Parker came late to the joys of the bottle but became unshakable devotees. Benchley’s father in Worcester, Massachusetts, had been an alcoholic, and his son was an “ardent prohibitionist,” who hailed the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment as “too good to be true.” But on the night of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, in July of 1921, a group of Round Tablers were celebrating Dempsey’s victory at Tony Soma’s speakeasy, on Forty-ninth Street, and Benchley,
who usually drank coffee at the speakeasy, was persuaded to have an Orange Blossom. Within weeks, he had moved on to whisky sours and become a bibulous mainstay at Tony’s, where liquor was served in thick white china cups. He favored rye, but was not above adding vodka to chocolate ice-cream sodas; the story goes—try and stop me—that when Scott Fitzgerald said to him, “Bob, don’t you know that drinking is slow death?,” Benchley responded, “So who’s in a hurry?” Benchley died (like Broun and Woollcott) in his fifties—of a cerebral hemorrhage complicated by cirrhosis of the liver.

Dorothy Parker, up to her marriage, in 1917, to Edwin Pond Parker II, was alcohol-innocent: “She hated the taste of liquor herself and refused to touch it.” Her husband, however, was a tremendous drinker, whose nickname in the ambulance corps was Spook, “because hangovers made him look pale as a ghost,” and who returned from the war addicted to morphine as well. To make herself companionable to Eddie and to such sportive
Vanity Fair
colleagues as Robert Sherwood, she began to allow herself a cocktail or two, despite being warned by the then-abstemious Benchley, “Alcohol will coarsen you.” Gin made her sick, but, “after a good deal of experimentation, she found that Scotch whisky, without water, was generally quick, safe, and reliable.” Although both her marriages—to Eddie and to Alan Campbell, a fellow writer and rumored homosexual—dissolved in alcoholic brawls, and long stretches of her career were soddenly unproductive, she remained faithful to Scotch into her seventies: “Several times she went too far with Scotch and found herself in Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. Whenever visitors appeared, she politely offered them a drink, then guessed she would pour one for herself.” A friend of her old age, Parker Ladd, thought to reduce her dependence by emptying a bottle with her:

For a time in Hollywood in 1951, she found a housemate with a thirst to match hers—James Agee, who, she told S. J. Perelman, had on one Friday evening “consumed three bottles of Scotch unaided.” Perelman
wrote of their ménage, which included Agee’s twenty-two-year-old companion, Pat Scallon (whom Dorothy named Pink Worm), that they lived “in a fog of crapulous laundry, stale cigarette smoke, and dirty dishes, sans furniture or cleanliness; one suspects they wet their beds.”

This is sad stuff, and Ms. Meade leaves little doubt, for those who might not have already heard, that the Algonquin wits and, for that matter, most of the literary lights of the Twenties carried forward their work under a fearful burden of booziness, at a cost of truncated lives and deflected ambitions. But since she is not, presumably, writing a temperance tract, one might ask what she
is
writing, in these four hundred nicely annotated and beautifully indexed pages. The biographer seems far from in love with her subject. Ms. Meade’s previous heroines have been Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Blavatsky, and the medieval nun Héloïse (in a novel), and her prose keeps crinkling as if with distaste at having to touch on the twentieth century, and on this unhappy and conflicted modern woman. Her subtitle seems excessive and awkward. Her sentences snarl with unprovoked aggression: