An outstanding new biography of Judith Jones, the legendary Knopf editor who helped shape modern American literature
Some biographers allow their subjects too much slack and are hesitant to find fault with them. Others have difficulty making convincing assessments possibly because they are too smitten with whom they are writing about. But Sara B. Franklin, in her new outstanding biography The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America seems to hit just the right note.
Franklin describes Jones as a proper lady of the privileged class who was always reluctant to put all her cards on the table. She never identified as a feminist, even as feminism exploded in the middle of her lifetime. Jones admits using her femininity to climb the corporate ladder at Knopf where she one of two female editors. She always said she saw both men and women as vulnerable beings who all carry crosses to bear and it’s clear she chose to bear her personal pain privately. One senses Franklin feels an affinity with such an inclination. The hardest hurdle Jones faced was finding out she was unable to bear children, but she didn’t dwell on this for long. She refused to dwell on regret, loss, anger, or resentment, and instead chose determination to carve out for herself an interesting life.
Jones spent more than half a century at Knopf, where she cultivated the careers of Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, Sharon Olds, John Updike, John Hersey, and more literary luminaries than I can list here. Her publishing career turbocharged almost by accident when an enormous tome accidentally dropped into her hands. It was Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which she published while developing a lifelong relationship with Julia Child as they worked on subsequent projects.
Jones’ career as an editor began in earnest when she acquired the rights to Sylvia Plath’s debut poetry collection, The Colossus, in 1961. She heard something extraordinary in Plath’s poetic voice. She was also drawn to the homoerotic fiction of Elizabeth Bowen, Florida Scott-Maxwell’s reflections on aging, as well as Carolyn Heilbrun’s exploration of motherhood, marital strife, and mental illness. Many of the writers who worked with Jones commented on her gentility and described her editing styled as “very delicate and graceful, almost weightless.” Some noticed a shy sweetness in her manner combined with an irreverence that took them off guard.
Jones always dressed impeccably, in tailored suits that showed off her slim figure which she accessorized with colorful scarves and classy jewelry to match. She was confident moving words around on a page and was a careful reader and listener. When she liked a manuscript, she would write “Nice!’ with her green pencil at the bottom of the final page of the manuscript.Yet, when things were off-kilter, she didn’t hesitate to call an author to her office in Manhattan where they would sometimes work for days putting a draft together that was suitable for publication.
Franklin tells us Jones concedes she had her blind spots. She turned down Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and twice rejected Alice Munro. She also rejected The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara.
Her childhood was a mixture of pleasure and unbearable loneliness. Her chilly mother was a society matron who wanted her daughters to aspire to a perfectionism she modeled for them. Judith had trouble conforming to her mother’s wishes. She escaped into books and would often seek out the household help begging them for stories about their childhoods.
She would take great joy in being with Edie, the household cook, while she prepared the family’s supper while telling little Judith Jones about her beloved Barbados. Edie would describe the red dirt of the island and the fruit which grew almost recklessly everywhere you looked. The little girl was already fascinated by other worlds. During the summers, Jones would stay with her paternal grandparents who were far laxer, and loved bike riding, swimming, and horseback-riding away from her mother’s watchful eye.
Jones landed at Bennington College, where she found herself drawn to literature. It was also where she had her first serious love affair, with her professor; he was 35, she was 19 at the time. She was drawn to his emotional rawness. Later, she found out he was manic-depressive, but their relationship lasted for years until it petered out.
At 24, Jones left for Pari,s where she rubbed shoulders with Robert Lowry, Jack Vandercook, Ken McCormick, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, and Andre Gide. She loved the way the French embraced life, their fearlessness regarding sensual pleasures. While still in Paris, she met her future husband, Dick Jones, who was a writer and journalist. They married as soon as his divorce finalized, and they moved to an apartment on East 48th Street in Manhattan.
The two of them would enjoy a marvelous marriage filled with all sorts of adventures. They both loved to travel, write, cook, and chill over long candlelight dinners when they would unwind after long days at the office. She was always the principal earner, but he worked as a writer in several venues over many years. When they realized they couldn’t conceive a child, they moved past it and never really looked back it seems, but it’s impossible to know if it cast any sort of gloom over their seemingly loving entanglement. He already had two daughters from his first marriage.
Her career was always front and center and he was an enthusiastic cheerleader for all her pursuits. She worked on John Hersey’s 1944 novel A Bell for Adano, which won the Pulitzer Prize. She worked with William Maxwell from the New Yorker, and Langston Hughes, whose Selected Poems published in 1959. Knopf never fairly compensated Jones, and when her husband encouraged her to ask for more money, she did so tentatively and they turned her down. She would never bring up the subject again.
Knopf kept Jones of editorial meetings for years and didn’t give her an office with a window for almost a decade, despite her bringing in huge amounts of revenue to the publishing house. Franklin allows us to see how Jones was able to move past such slights by not dwelling upon them. Instead, she would keep herself valuable as well as promote her authors her own way; often by directly contacting book review editors of major metropolitan newspapers to promote what she was working on. There were no publicity departments in publishing houses when she started and for many years afterwards. The critics usually had the final say on what became a bestseller.
As Franklin describes this truly remarkable life for us, she never loses sight of the little girl Jones once was whose mother whispered in her ear that she must always be pleasant and pleasing to others and must take great care with her appearance. Though it is clear Judith Jones found her mother difficult and withholding, it is also apparent that in many ways she picked up her mother’s restrained gestures and ladylike demeanor. She worked hard at making sure she was successful and didn’t waste time looking back. In some ways, she had her mother’s unsinkable nature, only the arena had shifted to a professional sphere.
Food and the production of innovative cookbooks came to dominate her thinking. She wanted to expose the American palate to try things of which they were unaware. She worked with Madhur Jaffrey on Indian cuisine, producing Curry: Myth and Reality. Jones also published The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo enjoying how Kuo used seductive language to describe food writing about “velveting little pieces of chicken, slippery coating them.” In 1976, she published The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis, who learned to cook around a wood stove in Vermont in the countryside.
Lewis’s book didn’t sell as well as anticipated and Mimi Sheraton, the food critic for The New York Times, wrote that she found the essays interspersed between recipes disconcerting and felt they had no place in a cookbook. It was just the essays that made Judith Jones feel this was an incredible cookbook. Lewis had such an authentic voice and was able to describe black life in the South and how they learned to make do in such a beautiful expressive way. Sheraton’s critique surprised Jones. Franklin concedes that Jones never seemed to give the entitlement of her class and race much thought and was caught off guard when she realized that others harbored resentments she didn’t. Jones had no personal animus and always found stories of other people and other cultures entrancing.
When her husband died, Jones thought the era of delicious candlelit dinners had closed, but rallied to make herself meals at night that she prepared with the same love and tenderness she employed when they cooked together. She wrote a book about her personal renaissance called The Pleasures of Cooking for One, and went on a book tour to promote it.
It is clear Judith Jones refused to succumb to sadness for any reason at all. Franklin understands this and allows her the personal space to grieve alone for all sorts of losses life throws at us. We never hear about her pain or resentments. We don’t get the inside scoop on fights with authors or colleagues, or about possible love affairs, or why her husband drank too much at times and fell into depressive periods. She never speaks at length about her experience with breast cancer.
We never get to know which friends or family disappointed her. When we see her on YouTube, she looks somewhat dour but every now and then she breaks into an unusual bout of laughter. At times, we wonder if perhaps Franklin has allowed Jones too much leeway. We feel maybe this book cheated out of the full picture. But then we remember that despite whatever sadnesses Jones had to deal with, the real point was she didn’t let any of them drown out her industrious spirit or indominable curiosity. She kept living all the way to 93. And we recognize that is precisely what Franklin is trying to share with us, the reality that we must all make a determined decision to live our best life; and to do our utmost to remain grounded in the busyness of daily living.