Culinary scholar Sara B. Franklin picked up a copy of “The Tenth Muse” as a college student and found it “fun,” but suspected there were shadowy corners of Jones’s life that had gone unexplored. A few years later, Franklin met and befriended Jones, confirmed that suspicion, and began taking notes on their conversations. In her discreet and deeply respectful new biography, “The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America,” Franklin restores the “disappointments, hard choices, mistakes, and pain” that Jones omitted from her sunny memoir. Simultaneously, she tries to give a notoriously modest woman her due. As Franklin puts it: “Nowhere could I find a depiction of Judith that even suggested the reaches of her curiosity and sophistication, her complexity and acumen, her savvy and her guile.” With this book, she has righted that wrong.
Born in 1924, Jones grew up in a genteel Manhattan family where the women were, Franklin writes, “groomed their whole lives to climb the social ladder and become ladies of society.” A bookworm from childhood, Judith never conformed. She wanted a career, she wanted varied experiences, she wanted to eat garlic. Probably the spiciest revelation in the book comes early: Studying at Bennington College in the 1940s, Jones fell in love with one of her professors, the poet Theodore Roethke. In Franklin’s quaint verbiage, Jones was drawn to the “workings of his intellect and his big, hulking frame.” The pair would later “tangle in the sheets.”
The tangling ceased after Jones moved to Paris in 1948 and encountered cafe life, sole meunière and her future husband, Evan Jones. (“I just wanted to spend my life with this person!” Judith gushed to Franklin decades later.) She began working at Doubleday’s Paris office and made her first contribution to literary history. It was a doozy. Charged with typing “polite pass” letters for books on the rejection pile, she instead read one of them over the course of an afternoon and convinced her boss that he was wrong about “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.” He sent the book to New York with an endorsement that didn’t mention Jones.
When she returned to New York, Jones took a job at Alfred A. Knopf, where she would work for the rest of her career. Franklin walks us through the many knockout hits, as well as a few misses. Jones pushed to publish Sylvia Plath’s first collection, “The Colossus,” though unaccountably turned down “The Bell Jar.” (Ironically, she envied Plath’s seemingly cozy domestic life.) She had long, sustaining professional relationships with John Updike, Anne Tyler — with whom she corresponded about a range of subjects, such as garden pests and print runs — and the poet Sharon Olds, who appreciated her “judgments, which were never unkind.” Her editing style, according to Tyler, was “very delicate and graceful, almost weightless.”
Naturally, Franklin devotes abundant real estate to Jones’s work on cookbooks, especially her relationship with Julia Child, which began in 1959. Knowing that Jones liked to cook, a colleague handed her a “thick, unwieldy stack of paper” that he assumed she would reject. Jones took it home in chunks and, following its recipe for boeuf bourguignon, made the best version of that dish she’d ever tasted. She went to bat for the book — and the rest really is history. What Franklin supplies here is context: At the time, cookbooks in the United States were “patronized, written off, or altogether ignored.” Jones changed that. She and Child both saw “cooking as a gateway to the wider world and a richer, more autonomous life,” and so, now, do many of us. Jones went on to nurture writers whose works line the shelves of American cooks to this day: Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, Joan Nathan and Edna Lewis, to name but a few.
So what were the struggles that Jones left out of the memoir? Franklin describes Jones’s conflicts with her boss, the legendary Robert Gottlieb, who comes off to her as a boor. He seems to have disdained Jones’s modesty, belittled her contributions, taken credit for her work and denied her only request for a raise. But the overarching sorrow of Jones’s life was, in Franklin’s telling, her infertility. Although she was close to her stepdaughters and later adopted the older children of family friends, she had badly wanted children of her own. None of this is unusual or dramatic except insofar as it shows that Jones, like everyone, had demons to battle and obstacles to surmount. That friction — absent from her memoir — makes her accomplishments all the more impressive.
While Jones’s memoir is a quicker, more effervescent read, Franklin, a loyal amanuensis, has filled in the holes, restored the cultural context and talked up the triumphs in an extraordinary life.
Jennifer Reese, the author of “Make the Bread, Buy the Butter,” is a freelance writer and critic.
How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America
