Writer Conscious: Katharine S. White, Mary McCarthy, and Editing as Intimacy at The New Yorker

In a closely argued three-page letter in 1946, Mary McCarthy flatly rejected New Yorker editor Katharine S. White's revisions to her latest submission. "I'm afraid that the new manuscript strikes a chill into me. Nearly all the changes sound to me false in tone," she wrote, before apologizing for the time White had spent on it and expressing regret that "this time it didn't work out."1 Yet the piece at hand, a reminiscence called "The Blackguard," ran in The New Yorker five months later.2 Miraculously, White salvaged both the essay and her relationship with McCarthy, and I will argue that her editorial work reveals much about the texts it produced within the context of a magazine that was at once fervently read, highly influential, and routinely criticized for formulaic fiction and harsh editing.

As McCarthy's somatic response to White suggests, the stakes for editorial intervention felt high to her, and she was quite ready to rescind the manuscript to preserve its integrity, despite her happy collaboration with White on two prior stories. Indeed, her wording sounds as if she is the editor rejecting a manuscript by White, and here we find a clue to the behind-the-scenes relations between editor and writer. The drivers of The New Yorker's transformation from scrappy humor magazine in the 1920s to literary powerhouse in the 1940s were the magazine's authors. The mythic figure of the editor has long been a forbidding male gatekeeper and tastemaker who rejects all but the chosen few and then takes a knife to their manuscripts, rejecting even more by slicing until only shards of essential value remain.3 In Katharine S. White's career at The New Yorker, we instead find a female editor who spent enormous time creating personal connections to her writers. She did so for two reasons: to draw out their best work and to keep them loyal to the magazine. This emotional investment in her writers in turn gave them the power to stretch the aesthetic conventions of the magazine, a power to which White was exceptionally responsive. White wrote to McCarthy, "The whole point of sending you that tentative version was for you to quarrel with our suggested changes and to change them as you yourself wanted to."4 This strategy worked, and within a month, McCarthy sent a new draft with a different ending that White accepted and published in the fall of 1946. This was not only a successful collaboration; it was also a generative one. McCarthy decided to continue writing reminiscences and The New Yorker eventually published five more, which then became the basis of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), which I will argue incorporates this very editorial process in its innovative structure.

Literary studies have only recently begun to look at the way affective relationships within institutions leave a "watermark" or "submerged traces" on the text, combining close readings with a materialist understanding of cultural production.5 Editing is precisely a close reading — in both senses of the phrase, not only a sustained interpretation but also an intimate encounter — within and at the behest of an institution. I argue that a detailed account of the relationship between writer and editor explains how a magazine, which is intrinsically composed of great variety, still has an immediately perceptible tone. Most scholarship on editing to date has concentrated on book editing (such as Maxwell Perkins's work with Thomas Wolfe) or a single story at a time (such as Gordon Lish's work with Raymond Carver), but a different vocabulary is necessary to describe the editing of a periodical that somehow reads as a unified whole. I am here using Sianne Ngai's definition of tone: "unfelt but perceived feeling," "a global and hyper-relational concept of feeling," a text's "affective bearing, orientation, or 'set toward' its audience and world."6 Tone arises from places "where 'affect' seems a fugitive presence attached to or hovering in the vicinity of words" and "remains loosely fastened to signifying practices."7 We will shortly enter a scene of White and McCarthy hovering in the vicinity of words. Tone, which is immanent and pervasive rather than stamped underneath like a watermark, allows us to discuss emotions that are neither subjectively felt by the reader nor lodged in the objective text. Not only is this definition tremendously useful for critically reading a magazine, in which it is impossible to locate a stable or unified ground that gives rise to the reader's feelings, but it also helps bring into focus something else that is immanent and ill-defined: the cultural position of the text at hand. Tone allows us to draw a line between the intimate practice of editing a piece and its readers' aesthetic judgment of it, a judgment often attained by invoking, implicitly or explicitly, "the brows" and their architecture for perceiving and classifying taste.

The New Yorker has been difficult to pin on the continuum of the brows, and critics have read it variously as middlebrow, modern, smart, or high middlebrow.8 So, too, has the work of Mary McCarthy evaded easy classification. Her novels, memoirs, essay collections, story collections, and travel writing have sold well and achieved critical acclaim, which taken together would categorize them as middlebrow. But they are also frequently taught in universities, have been the subject of abundant scholarship, and resist many of the formal traits of the middlebrow (such as earnestness), which suggest that readers find them to be — or are trying to claim them as — highbrow literature that requires specialized knowledge to interpret.9 It is at once obvious and imprecise to say that The New Yorker lies somewhere between, say, Life and the Paris Review, just as the work of McCarthy lies between that of Jacqueline Susann and Susan Sontag. The obviousness of this position, I suggest, arises from tone, and tone arises in part from the collaboration of editor and writer. White consciously created an intimate space of dialogue for each of her authors, a space in which the magazine's stylistic prescriptions were negotiated and the author's sovereignty over her work was affirmed, and White's authors recreated that space in their works which themselves dealt with intimacy, the efficacy of language, and the primacy of the narrative voice.

Personal-Editorial

Katharine S. White's intimate editing style, what she called the "personal-editorial letter," was not the inevitable result of her gender, as if that's what you get when you place an emoting woman in a position of aesthetic judgment.10 Rather, White tailored her approach to writers to align with The New Yorker's shifting position in the literary marketplace. This essay begins with the particular solutions that White devised to the perennial shortage of good writing in the magazine's early years, solutions that set the tenor for the postwar years when the magazine assumed its position as a literary tastemaker.

To fully account for the work of editing, it is necessary to think about what an editor produces. As the first and longtime head of the Fiction Department at The New Yorker, Katharine S. White did not produce a magazine. Harold Ross, the founding editor, had the final say in what the magazine accepted or rejected, and though his name never appeared in print in his own magazine, he was a staple of gossip columns and functioned as an effective synecdoche for his magazine; thus he exemplified the "charismatic" editorial type, someone whose personality guides the periodical and whose social capital draws contributors to it.11 Ross read every submission his editors considered and responded with his infamous "queries," lists of questions and requests for clarification, but editors and writers were free to ignore them. Ross did no real editing and White did no real publishing (as at most magazines, the managing editor was the one to assemble and schedule issues from the timely pieces and the pieces waiting in the "bank"). In this sense, White's job was to interpret, embody, and enforce Ross's sense of the magazine's ideology, but her job also required her to find ways to make her own work predictable and sustainable, given the punishing rhythms of a weekly magazine. White's long and detailed "personal-editorial" letters were her way of forging relationships with writers within the magazine's ideology, as she painstakingly justified each rejection or request for revision. She meant the word "personal" to mean not autobiographical or revealing but singular; it was her response to the work that was personal, and her letters worked hard to convey a strong sense of the editor as a focused and sympathetic reader of the piece at hand.

White joined the editorial staff of The New Yorker just a few months after Harold Ross founded it in 1925 and for the first eleven years, she edited almost everything. She invented the term "casual" for a short, comic piece that could be fiction, memoir, or an indistinguishable blend of both, and the casual became a New Yorker mainstay. In 1936, Ross split the editorial staff between Fact and Fiction, and White became head of the Fiction Department, which included poetry, casuals, and memoir — a blithely inexact definition of the genre.12 Indeed, even at the tail end of the 1930s, which has been called a boom time for the American short story, the magazine was still hard-pressed to differentiate fiction from nonfiction. White assembled the magazine's first collected volume of short stories in 1940, and in a draft of the introduction, she wrote, "In making this selection it was persistently difficult to decide where fiction began and fact left off, and virtually impossible to establish a genuine and satisfying distinction between what is a short story and what is not."13 The editors rarely discussed genre with authors or attempted to fit a given piece into a set of narrative conventions.

While White gave almost no thought to questions of genre, she gave meticulous thought and considerable engineering to the question of how to retain her authors. As a weekly magazine which published four times as many pieces as the monthlies with which it competed, The New Yorker had a rapacious appetite, and for much of the 1930s, it couldn't match its competitors' pay rates, but the magazine had done so well at discovering talent in the slush pile that other publications routinely tried to steal away their writers and artists with fat paychecks. Two crises prompted an enduring solution for retention. First, Otto Soglow, the artist whose Little King character had become a New Yorker mainstay, tried to decamp for the Hearst papers in 1932; then, Ogden Nash, whose first poem White had published, began appearing in the Saturday Evening Post in 1933. Soglow and Nash wanted more money, certainly, but they also wanted contracts that would guarantee acceptance of their work. The New Yorker was wholly unwilling to grant that. What The New Yorker vastly preferred, and what they would refine over the next decades without ever naming it as such, was a system of patronage. They supported their artists and held high expectations for both quantity and quality, without ever shading in the details of those broad outlines for creative output -- a system closer to those of modernist literary journals than deep-pocketed organizations like the Hearst papers.14 In response to Soglow and Nash, White designed a contract called the "first reading agreement," which gave the magazine the right of first refusal on anything the writer produced, in exchange for a healthy annual signing bonus and the promise of a fast turnaround so that rejected pieces could be placed elsewhere. When McCarthy signed a first reading agreement in March of 1946, for instance, she was given $100 to bind the contract and a 25% increase over her previous years' pay rate.15 Later agreements added a yearly bonus if six or more pieces had been accepted.16

If White was largely unconcerned with matters of genre, she made up for it by her intense focus on seriality. The instant a writer submitted a piece she liked, she asked for more of it. Ever since the phenomenal success of Clarence Day's "Life With Father" stories, which in turn inspired James Thurber's "My Life and Hard Times," White and Ross avidly hunted for stories and characters who could recur. Indeed, a series was such a great way to intersect the magazine's bottomless need for material with the authors' need for income that it could almost act as an editorial guarantee of acceptance, and the structure could almost serve as a template to facilitate artistic production. The New Yorker series guaranteed loyalty and became, for many writers, a generativity machine.

Even before she bought a piece, White would work with the writer to revise it, mainly to give it the best possible chance of earning Ross's approval. After acceptance, the piece would undergo Ross's queries, more of White's revisions, fact checking, and proofreading. The New Yorker amply earned its reputation for rigorous editing, but for White, it was a point of exalted professional pride that not a single change was made without the author's approval.17 Yet she was obliged to enforce Ross's many idiosyncratic prohibitions. He was squeamish on sex and even more horrified by what White called "bathroom realism," so if a piece would be ruined by excising those details, it must be rejected; really any flavor of debauchery or profanity needed to be aesthetically justified for it to be considered, even including the mention of snakes. These strictures, combined with his incredibly picayune queries on manuscripts and proofs and his unwillingness to publish a poem he couldn't understand, gave Ross the reputation of a philistine, a naïve reader, the middlebrow foil against whom White fought to raise the magazine's brow.

Ross adamantly opposed anything he deemed "writer conscious." This phrase (the editors never used a hyphen) became a New Yorker byword, one that White used in dozens of letters to her authors to explain rejections. The phrase was officially defined in Wolcott Gibbs's part-satirical essay, "Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles," which he produced at White's request for in-house use to train new editors in the mid-1930s:

To quote Mr. Ross again, "Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer." Pieces about authors, reporters, poets, etc. are to be discouraged in principle. Whenever possible the protagonist should be arbitrarily transplanted to another line of business. When the reference is incidental and unnecessary, it should come out.18

White diligently implemented this criteria and it appeared to make sense to her, as she was "deluged with pieces about writers and writing, and tr[ied] to avoid them whenever possible."19 Furthermore, it concorded with Ross's insistence on suppressing the author function of his writers under the magazine's larger identity. For most of the twentieth century, The New Yorker contained no table of contents or masthead, placed bylines at the ends of articles, and ran "Talk of the Town" and "Notes and Comment" (largely written by White's husband, E.B. White) with no bylines at all.20 Thus, The New Yorker rendered invisible not just the work of editing, but also the work of writing. In the pages of the magazine, writing was not exalted, and the source of any given piece's authority or interest was not centrally located in its writer's identity.

Writer Conscious

And yet somehow, within all these limits, they managed to get out a magazine, week after week. If their writers complained about the magazine's tendency to overedit — and they did — the editors complained about the paucity of work that needed no editing.21 In 1946, Ross estimated that they had only three or four such "clean" writers. "Everything depends on the editing," he wrote to White. "In the long run, this magazine is run on salvage."22 When McCarthy finally turned in an acceptable draft of "The Blackguard" after rewriting White's placeholder edits, Ross felt that their process was affirmed. He pronounced her work "fine" and "unified" and was gratified that this "highly distinctive writer" had been responsive to White's revisions. "On the whole, I regard this place as a writing school," he concluded in his memo to White. "I think our function should be to get writers to write right."23 Ross viewed the editorial process as a disciplinary force; in this sense, the early New Yorker was a precursor to the creative writing programs whose effects would not be felt for another two decades.24

Mary McCarthy's writing first appeared in The New Yorker in 1937, the same year she joined the masthead of Partisan Review, when she submitted a small item to "Talk of the Town."25 She then drew at least three rejections before White's protégé, editor William Maxwell, accepted "The Company Is Not Responsible." But Maxwell dropped the ball on edits of that story and didn't respond when McCarthy sent him a first draft of what would become "The Blackguard."26 Maxwell went on leave, and McCarthy's work might never have caught on at The New Yorker if White had not swooped in to rescue the relationship. She was electrified when McCarthy submitted "The Weeds" in 1944, a long and daring story about a woman who leaves her overbearing husband. White could relate to the subject matter, because she had left her overbearing first husband fifteen years previously, and soon McCarthy did exactly what she'd written for her protagonist, so that "[i]n effect she had written herself out of the marriage," in the words of one of her biographers.27 The editor and the writer likely bonded over this shared bit of personal experience, just as they had over their gardens (a garden also figures in the story), and they soon became friends who socialized outside of work. White rushed "The Company Is Not Responsible" into print so that she could publish "The Weeds," one of the longest stories The New Yorker had yet run and a moneymaker for McCarthy at sixteen cents a word, not to mention a controversial story which generated a stack of mail from readers.

Over the next two years, White tried mightily to publish more stories by McCarthy. She regularly wrote to McCarthy and her agent, Bernice Baumgarten at Brandt & Brandt, to ask if there were any new pieces on the horizon. Even though McCarthy submitted nothing in 1945, White bumped her pay rate up to eighteen cents a word and offered her a first reading agreement in March of 1946. White may not have been aware of McCarthy's ambivalent attitude toward The New Yorker. McCarthy sliced into John Hersey's "Hiroshima," which famously filled the entire August 31, 1946 issue. Her November 1946 critique in Politics — which augmented occasional New Yorker contributor Dwight Macdonald's own attack the previous month — found the magazine singularly incapable of opposing the atom bomb, noting how nicely Hersey's piece nestled among ads for smoked turkey and the Hotel Carlyle. She despised how Hersey's interviews with survivors tamed the bomb into just another natural disaster with heroic escapes, told in that most middlebrow register: the human interest story.28

Yet McCarthy had resubmitted the "The Blackguard" in April, perhaps in response to the first reading agreement, and she and White entered the disputatious process of editing it. Without White's encouragement, McCarthy arguably might never have revisited this piece, or indeed revisited her childhood. The New Yorker next published "Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?," which would become the first essay in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, and then two more short stories. But it is the third reminiscence that McCarthy wrote, "A Tin Butterfly," whose editing process demonstrates so much of what made White and The New Yorker distinctive.

In October 1951, McCarthy submitted "A Tin Butterfly" via Baumgarten. As she had with other pieces, White wrote immediately to say she loved it and wanted to buy it, "provided you are willing to do a little more work on it."29 She offered to go through a round of preliminary edits with McCarthy, to make sure their visions for the piece were compatible before officially buying the piece, and she offered to mail a good-faith advance against the purchase price.

White's letter and her penciled notes on McCarthy's draft make clear what work she thought McCarthy needed to perform. "A Tin Butterfly" describes McCarthy's great-aunt Margaret and her husband Myers, to whose begrudging care six-year-old Mary and her three younger brothers had been consigned when their parents died in the 1918 flu epidemic. McCarthy labeled Aunt Margaret "totalitarian" for the way she was "bent on destroying our privacy," but it was Uncle Myers who was positively tyrannical.30 He forbade reading, and when Mary won $25 in an essay competition, he took her to the downstairs bathroom and beat her with a razor strop. All four children were regularly beaten, especially Mary. How, though, to properly describe these outlandish people and this unbelievable childhood? White wrote that she hoped "that you will be willing to tone down a few places where the story sounds almost incredible. Of course I know the facts are true, but you have to persuade your reader they are true, and in one or two spots we feel that it sounds as though you were exaggerating."31 She asked if McCarthy could come down from Newport, Rhode Island, to go over the piece together in person.

As with "The Blackguard," White's initial foray into the piece spooked McCarthy. She began by saying she wasn't opposed to revision, but "my chief anxiety is that fact shouldn't be tailored to produce credibility."32 She was all too aware that her story was hard to believe, "but this, it seems to me, is its quality, of a Dickens novel imposed on real life. It's as though those horrors I was related to had read Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickleby and taken it as a model to imitate." She declined White's offer of a partial payment because she wasn't yet sure if White would accept her insistence on the "monstrously inexplicable" quality of the reminiscence, even though she also admitted that she was "broke" and therefore couldn't afford the trip down to New York to edit in tandem.

So far, their conversation had unfolded exactly according to the script — editorial praise which carried just a hint of revisions to come, followed by writerly alarm which carried just the barest willingness to inch toward those revisions — and White's next letter was the most important in the dialogue. The New Yorker was "wild to buy this piece right away," she told McCarthy, and she was so sure they'd be able to collaborate on revisions that she was sending a $200 advance, despite McCarthy's demurral.33 Then came a passage which White would write dozens of times, in different words, over the course of her career:

I desperately wish that you and I could sit down and talk about the manuscript in general and in detail, for when I put something in a written note it sounds heavy and over-important. Please therefore remember that these are just suggestions—not positive requests; they are merely matters, large and tiny, for you to consider. And of course any pencilled in [sic] rewordings are not the right ones but are meant as guideposts to show you what was on our minds. Any changes should be your own.

For White, the written word was an inadequate medium for discussing the written word. She needed a looser, more casual medium to better convey her reading, a way to be more approximate, more provisional, and less definite in her criticisms. Partly this had to do with the power differential — rendering her words "heavy and over-important" — between editor and writer. But more salient was White's investment in the intimacy and reciprocity of an in-person conversation.

White and McCarthy had many such editing sessions over the years, and later McCarthy remembered their "almost unvarying ritual." First, White would treat her to lunch at the Algonquin — one martini apiece — at which they "gossiped, discussed common friends and connections," and "exchanged opinions, which often jibed, of current books and authors, discussed stories that had appeared in the New Yorker, sometimes critically."34 Then they'd cross the street and head up to White's office, where they'd go over a piece sentence by sentence, their work punctuated by White "rising to consult the big Webster on the lectern in her office," and they'd finish the editing in a single session. McCarthy remembered two things that made White's editing superlative. She "saw herself as a defensive bulwark against" Ross's sometimes ridiculous queries and often she would "draw a line through an editorial question or suggestion and make a little sound of annoyance." White was "distinctly on the author's side." Also, she was for McCarthy "the ideal editor" because they thoroughly enjoyed talking over the tiniest of word choices, such as when to use "grey" versus "gray" (the former was, to both of them, a lighter shade). When White retired, William Maxwell became McCarthy's New Yorker editor. She wrote that "the kind of detail Katharine and I hovered over didn't figure in our letters back and forth," though Ben Fried's essay in this issue amply demonstrates that Maxwell did, in fact, create personal-editorial relationships with an important roster of authors.

This, then, is what White produced as a magazine editor, this scene of intense receptivity, of immersive concentration on a writer's piece, of reciprocal reading and sympathetic negotiation over the smallest elements of composition. Letters could only approximate this scene, a close reading at her desk on the 19^th floor in the heart of The New Yorker's offices on West 45^th Street. White quite literally brought her writers into the institution, and that became the primary value she offered them: an extended moment in which the writer could be seen and her work read. Taken together with the evolving structure behind her acquisitions — her casualness toward genre, the first reading agreement, her interest in serials — and Ross's prohibition of writer consciousness, what distinguished White's editing is the way it offered to her writers the expansion of the solitary moment of reading and writing: a private, intimate partnership, entirely off the page, in which the writer could share her expression from the smallest compositional unit to the largest narrative arc.

White oriented her editorial work wholly to her writers, rather than her imagining of the magazine's readership. She concentrated her efforts on giving her writers the artistic gratification of this scene of editing. Such gratification was an embodied form of the same value that middlebrow literature offered to postwar readers, what Janice Radway has termed "middlebrow personalism": "a picture of the world that, for all its modern chaos, domination by abstract and incomprehensible forces, and worries about standardization and massification, was still the home of individual, idiosyncratic selves," and a mode of reading that was characterized by empathy and absorption, the connection of individuals within and across texts.35 In other words, White offered to her writers some of what Ross withheld from his readers with his prohibition on writer consciousness and overt authorial identity. And this editor-writer relationship affected the form of the work produced within it, just as the writer-reader relationship gave rise to formal features of middlebrow.

This effect obtained even when White could not meet with a writer in person. Her lengthy, detailed letters often worked because previous in-person editing sessions had built a foundation of trust and the writer had learned how to read White's notes. The rest of the editing process for "A Tin Butterfly" exemplified this. White sent McCarthy a sheaf of edits and a letter explaining them. She wanted McCarthy to keep Uncle Myers as the "true villain" of the piece but to make clear that she regarded Aunt Margaret differently, having achieved a certain compassion for her as an adult.36 She loved McCarthy's suggestion that Margaret and Myers had learned parenting skills from Dickens novels, and agreed that it should be worked into the essay. Channeling Ross with palpable reluctance she asked McCarthy to tone down a passage about sitting on "the throne," and could the vexing word "belly button" be forsaken? Most important, White indicated one "really incredible" passage which she thought McCarthy could strengthen if it were "amplified a bit." But she stressed — and this was a crucial part of the script — that if McCarthy didn't want to change anything, they'd still accept the piece as it was. She wrote a separate letter to McCarthy's agent underlining that fact.

The passage in question was the end of the essay and the source of its title. Uncle Myers, who prohibited his wards from eating candy, whimsically gave one of Mary's brothers, Sheridan, a box of Cracker Jacks; at the bottom Sheridan found a butterfly pin, which immediately became his most cherished possession. Mary pretended indifference. When the pin disappeared a week later, Uncle Myers suspected Mary of stealing it and wouldn't listen to her denial; that night, when she cleared her place after dinner, she found the pin fastened under the tablecloth, and was then subjected to the worst beating of her life. Uncle Myers whipped her, and when his arm got tired, Aunt Margaret took a turn with the hairbrush. When Mary still refused to confess, her guardians repeated the beatings: once more, Myers went first, then Margaret. The essay ends six or seven years later, when Mary discusses this night with her brothers, and Preston informs her that he saw Myers hide the pin under the tablecloth.

McCarthy's response testifies to the extraordinary effects of White's edits. She submitted a new draft just five days after the date on White's letter. She began by thanking her for "how nice I think you've been," especially for the much-needed advance, and by saying she believed her story "has been greatly improved by your criticism."37 Then she described "a very strange thing": as McCarthy had begun to revise the passage about the beating, "the whole scene came back to me in detail, where before I'd remembered it only in words." She wrote, "This seems to indicate that artistic truth and factual truth are inseparable — something I've always believed but that many critics don't. What you sensed as wrong there artistically was wrong, or at any rate cursory, which is really the same thing." White's close reading unintentionally produced the author's true intention, prompting McCarthy to recall the "truth" of her past. White was, in McCarthy's interpretation, so empathetically inside the words on the page that she could detect the failure of those words to do their job of touching reality, could sense the presence of what they weren't saying.

McCarthy greatly expanded the whipping scene, adding details to enliven it — Uncle Myers rolling up his sleeves, McCarthy's own wild cries — but also making clear how she understood the episode at the time.38 The passage grew thick with newly added phrases like "I did not really believe," "I presumed," "It was clear to me," "It did not occur to me," and so on. McCarthy more precisely located her perceiving mind. She also changed the ending. The first draft asserted that the whipping continued over the next few days; the final draft portrays McCarthy waking up in fear the next day only to discover, "incredulously," that her aunt and uncle would no longer touch her, and in her refusal to confess she became to herself "a figure from legend."39

In addition to the whipping scene, McCarthy made almost all the other changes White requested. Six weeks later, after another round of revisions, "A Tin Butterfly" was published in the December 15, 1951 issue of The New Yorker.

Editor Conscious

The pattern of White's editorial practice emerges with stark clarity from the New Yorker archive. This narrative arc, from first draft to magazine publication and beyond, recurs with startling consistency in the cases of Vladimir Nabokov and Elizabeth Bishop, as this all-too-brief summary hopes to demonstrate. In both cases, just like with McCarthy, White rescued the author from benign neglect and saved a relationship that became crucial to both the magazine and the author's publishing career.

Poetry editor Charles Pearce accepted one of Elizabeth Bishop's poems and then rejected the next thirteen; only when White helped select Bishop for the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Prize Fellowship in 1944 did her New Yorker career truly get underway.40 Pearce published six of Nabokov's poems, but only when White read Nabokov's first autobiographical essay in the Atlantic and reached out through their mutual friend Edmund Wilson to offer him both an advance and a first reading agreement did Nabokov begin to submit prose to The New Yorker.41 Each author then began to develop a memoir series with White, who frequently worked to edit the pieces over several rounds before passing them along to in-house editors for final approval and purchase.

White's pre-edits often began contentiously. She wanted to publish Bishop's "In the Village," the second of her reminiscences of growing up in Nova Scotia, about the summer that Bishop's mother returned home from a Boston sanitarium but was then recommitted. But first White requested substantial clarifications to the flickering points of view, telling Bishop that she wanted the reader to have "that sense of relaxation that comes from really understanding it. One does not have to understand everything of course but one ought not to be so constantly puzzled that one keeps thinking about the puzzle rather than about your words and your beautiful poetic and emotional effects."42 Bishop pushed back, but when White gave the piece a good-faith preliminary edit, along with the customary lament that they couldn't edit together in person (Bishop was in Brazil), she relented and agreed that the changes made the piece better. The two worked over the piece for the next eleven months, until at last White simply cancelled the final list of queries, telling Bishop that "the story was really like a poem and therefore had every right to be unconventional in small matters of punctuation, usage, repetitions etc."43 It appeared in December of 1953 and White told her that its publication "was the thing that gave me the most satisfaction in the year 1953."44

Nabokov and White worked closely on eleven of the fifteen essays that would be published as Conclusive Evidence in 1951 (after White helped him find a publisher). Sometimes Nabokov appreciated her edits — he once told her, employing a butterfly motif, that she had "re-pinned and re-set the story very delicately and sympathetically" — but at other times he resisted her attempts to clarify what he wanted to remain obscure.45 When he submitted a fictional story, "Symbols and Signs," in the midst of the memoir series, it drew a characteristic exchange. "I've decided to ask you what your intention is in it," White wrote, because it would guide her edits; if it were parody or satire, "what might be considered over-writing in a straight realistic story ought to be retained and even heightened."46 She reported being "nagged by the suspicion that there might be more than met the eye in your piece." Nabokov played it straight and said he failed to see her point, that it was "a good sample of my usual style."47 White agreed to abide by his intentions and apologized for her misunderstanding: "I've never known, though, how to act as an editor conducting business by mail, except to speak with the same frankness and forthrightness that I would if I were talking to an author. If I could have seen you, I could have just asked your intentions before the piece was edited...."48 But when she sent back the story, Nabokov was offended by how it had been "so carefully mutilated" and threatened to pull the piece.49

Predictably, his objection prompted a five-page letter from White with detailed explanations and qualifications. She began by saying he was free to reverse almost all of their edits, then she explained that the rewordings were to be considered "dummy wordings," and she ended by saying, "distance has been our greatest enemy on this story—indeed in all our dealings."50 Her battle-tested strategy succeeded, and the story was published. But years later, when he was trying to get White to accept "The Vane Sisters" with its second story "woven into or placed behind" the superficial primary story, Nabokov wrote White a letter that has since become famous: his detailed explication of the story behind the story in "Symbols and Signs," fully vindicating White's "nagging suspicion" about his authorial intentions.51 Indeed, he'd already vindicated her editorial practice in "Chapter Sixteen" of Conclusive Evidence, written in 1950 and shared with White but not published until after his death, in which he described such things as her "verbal 'dummies'" offered for revision. "An excellent proof of the harmonious accord between author and editor," he wrote in the third person, "is the fact that Nabokov greedily preserved the majority of the corrections in regard to his skittish syntax and also the beautiful 'close' system of the New Yorker punctuation."52

Does the pattern of White's strong editorial practice emerge like a watermark in the pieces she edited? All her life, White impatiently dismissed accusations that The New Yorker edited pieces into pre-determined formulas by pointing to the incredible variety among her authors. Even the small sample of pieces under examination here bears out that rebuttal. I would argue that the relevant question, instead, is more Nabokovian: can we see, woven into or placed behind the stories and reminiscences, a different narrative about editing than is usually told?

In 1957, when she collected her New Yorker reminiscences into a book, McCarthy made an unusual narrative choice, one that was at once inspired by White's editorial process and transcendent of the magazine's prohibition against writer consciousness. "A Tin Butterfly" and the other five New Yorker essays, plus one that ran in Harper's Bazaar and one that was unpublished, appeared largely unchanged, but after each chapter, McCarthy appended a few additional pages in which she reread her own essay and commented on the proximity of her original words to the factual truth as she subsequently understood it. These intertextual passages sound like nothing so much as White's editorial letters, giving broad readings of the essays and gently probing their weaknesses.

Immediately after the dramatic ending of "A Tin Butterfly," McCarthy casts doubt on its veracity. Preston does not remember seeing Uncle Myers with the pin, nor does he remember telling McCarthy that he did. McCarthy wonders if she didn't manufacture that ending when she wrote a previous version for a college screenwriting class; she further wonders if it wasn't her professor who suggested it. "I can almost hear her voice saying to me, excitedly: 'Your uncle must have done it!'"53 McCarthy frames her memoir as an exercise in self-authorization. She writes that as an orphan, "the chain of recollection — the collective memory of a family—has been broken," turning her into a quester within her own memories.54 Without parents to adjudicate, only she can authorize herself to tell the truth, and she posits the interludes between chapters as soul-baring confessions which, taken together, add up to this authority. Yet here she imputes the "truth" of the event to her professor, just as she earlier credited White with discerning the "factual truth" before she herself did. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood seeks to earn its authority with regularly staged confessions that get ever closer to the truth, yet here McCarthy locates the truth (or its felt absence) in the words of a female mentor whom she then ventriloquizes. Though the confessional interludes would seem to undercut her own authority as a truth teller, they instead allow McCarthy to locate that authority elsewhere: in her own power of adjudication. She is doing precisely what White did when the latter discovered factual truth by closely and empathetically reading artistic truth. In the seriality of her interludes and in her questioning of the narrator within the memoir's very pages, McCarthy adopts an editorial stance toward her own self-presentation. (No wonder, then, that White wrote McCarthy an enthusiastic letter upon the publication of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood: "I can't begin to tell you how intensely interesting and how exactly right I find the foreword and the connective links between the chapters. I think their tone is exactly right and their honesty is exciting."55)

If White's editing practice left a trace on the pieces she edited with her long-time authors, it was by way of the relationship she cultivated between author and text, and it can be seen best in the serialized reminiscences. Much of the work that White prompted in her editing (often in anticipation of or in collaboration with Ross's queries) concerned the epistemological clarity of the narration. With the first draft, the writer had achieved a certain distance from his or her past; White then helped the writer attain further distance from his or her text. This was a chief, if largely untheorized, concern of The New Yorker, that this distance be clearly perceptible, that the reader should at all moments know who is speaking or thinking, how that speaker or thinker relates to the narrator, and how the narrator relates to the author. And this goes a long way toward explaining White's fervent preference for in-person editing sessions: sitting alone at a desk to write letters was not the ideal method for placing the unseen rods that held those distances open. The editing work that White performed most distinctively was intensely social, because it entailed a kind of replication of herself. If she was known for her "readiness to see the point of view of self-centered authors," as Nabokov put it, she was simultaneously — invisibly — coaching those authors to become like her.56 There they sat together at her desk as she practiced the art of detaching the writer from her draft, getting her to become her own editor. Ironically, White's close readings created distance.

The New Yorker's injunction against writer consciousness, combined with White's policies to ensure a steady stream of material that would work within The New Yorker's particular market, instilled in its writers a subtler stance of being editor-conscious of their own texts, a stance which mirrored White's actual role as invisible yet influential. White encouraged her writers to move away from the scene of writing, but rather than asking them to consider the scene of reading, she invented a scene of editing in which her writers could watch themselves find their way to the works' final forms. Thematically and structurally, New Yorker reminiscences evinced a mastery of the personal which, I would argue, allowed them to function as a vanishing mediator between the roots of creative writing in John Dewey's principle of self-expression and the Program era, with its institutionalized injunction to "write what you know."57 These reminiscences were a generative literary mode that lay outside of the classroom and the anthology yet within the magazine's larger pedagogical mission of welcoming readers into its "sophisticated" world; they helped The New Yorker make the cultural landscape legible by implicitly teaching what it more overtly pretended readers already knew. White's authors accomplished this work, in large part, through their emphasis on what they knew — through the way the reader is invited to locate herself in relation to the perceiving subject in the reminiscences of McCarthy, Bishop, Nabokov, and other New Yorker writers, all of them performing a kind of hovering-over that mimics the initial scene of close reading in White's office. In other words, tone emanates from the spaces between all these actors — editor, author, and reader — but its fullness can only be captured when the scope of inquiry is broadened to the scene of editing.

Future scholarship on literary editing might profitably study occasions when editing did not result in publication because a given editor failed to replicate his or her editorial consciousness in a given writer. Even within the tiny sample of authors examined in this article, we can find instances when seriality failed or was abandoned. Elizabeth Bishop originally planned to include a total of four to six essays in her Nova Scotia series, but she stopped after the second reminiscence, and indeed she never published prose in The New Yorker again.58 Vladimir Nabokov planned a sequel to Speak, Memory, to be called either Speak On, Memory or Speak, America. He sketched out at least seven essays and started writing at least one of them, but he never showed his fragments to White and he never finished any of them.59

Failure to communicate was itself a theme common to all three writers at hand. Bishop's "In the Village" begins with a wordless scream which "hangs like that, unheard, in memory—in the past, in the present, and those years between"; it is her mother's scream — a symbol of her instability and one of the essay's many invocations of broken communication.60 Nabokov's "Symbols and Signs" concerns a couple and their suicidal adult son, "incurably deranged in his mind" from "referential mania" in which "everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence." The couple's phone rings twice in the night, a wrong number, and the story ends when it rings a third time, leaving the reader to interpret that wordless sign — and to risk overinterpretation, the path to madness.61 Lastly, one of the passages that McCarthy excised from "A Tin Butterfly" at White's request was about her Jewish grandmother, a subject to which she returned in her final New Yorker essay in the series: "Ask Me No Questions." This last essay culminates with her grandmother's scream upon hearing of her sister's death, a "fearful insensate noise" which seems to McCarthy an instance of "classic Jewish mourning" — a noise which reveals her grandmother's ethnic background despite herself.62 Each of these projects measures the distance between the unreachable, wordless other and the articulate writer, without being writer conscious. From a successful scene of editing comes a scene that precedes words, that communicates something despite its character's inarticulateness, and that it is the narrator's work to decipher. I would argue that the pathos that arises from this implicit contrast is a characteristic of New Yorker fiction and memoir.

"Ask Me No Questions" concludes Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and it is the only essay that stands on its own, without an editorial revision. A note preceding the story explains that it was written much later than the others and only after McCarthy's grandmother had died. In a postcard to Katharine S. White from Florence, McCarthy noted that her grandmother was "resisting being written about (from beyond the grave) with all the obdurate coquetry of her character."63 She ended the piece — and the book — with her own realization that her grandmother had become senile, as Mary witnesses her trying and failing to recall the word for "mirror." There her grandmother sits in her bedroom, gesturing toward the chiffonier, and it is Mary who has surrounded her with descriptive language and supplied the key word. Her grandmother's inarticulateness has been corrected through the writer's narrative control, through the importation of her grandmother into the familiar world of The New Yorker. What remains inscrutable — private, too intimate for the page — is the scene of editing. By the time Katharine S. White read "Ask Me No Questions," Mary McCarthy had returned to New York, where their editing session was conducted in person.

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Amy Reading is the author of The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker(forthcoming from HarperCollins in September 2024). This book was supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the New York Public Library, the Robert and Ina Caro Travel/Research Fund, and the Robert B. Silvers Grant for Works in Progress. She is also the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con (Knopf). She holds a PhD in American studies from Yale University and lives in upstate New York. 

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