Odd Jobs (141 page)

The private springs he drew upon for his poetry were exceptionally deep and difficult of access. A poet of Auden’s preening fluency must have seemed to him a creature from another planet. He believed, as firmly as the Surrealists, in the crucial collaboration of the subconscious, of buried forces he hoped to call to the surface with a drumbeat of verbal rhythm. When he wrote the final sections of
The Waste Land
, he told an interviewer, “I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying.” His imagination was thoroughly auditory, a matter of voices and repetitions; sharp visual images become ever more rare in his poetry as the cadence of utterance, increasingly pontifical and ruminative, takes over. After the example of Dante, he strove for simplicity and directness, to the point of baldness; in an unpublished address given in New Haven in 1933 he spoke of hoping to write poetry “with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry.” However lame and flat the thing being said (and his tranced way of composing admits much that seems flat and semi-conscious), the music is real, and seeks those ancient centers of awareness where incantation and lullaby merge.

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:

O
NWARD AND
U
PWARD:
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:

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: