Book editors rarely receive media coverage. They typically stay in the background while authors take up space and create culture. But many of us who are fans of Julia Child know that Judith Jones, her editor at Knopf, was the consummate collaborator and helpmate to Julia and her career. She also brought The Diary of Anne Frank to a US audience and worked with Sylvia Plath, John Updike, Anne Tyler and cookbook notables Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and Marcella Hazan. In short, she's responsible for many of the cookbooks that shaped the palate of a generation. Judith, by extension, taught many Americans to cook. The woman had an epic intelligence combined with exceptional taste. Sara B. Franklin has written The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America.
Evan Kleiman: So much of Judith's personal story developed in opposition to the household she grew up in. Could you center her parents and America? What was the world like when Judith was growing up in that particular household?
Sara B. Franklin: That's such a good and important question. Judith was born in Manhattan in 1924. She was born sandwiched between World War I and the Great Depression. Her mother was from a family that had come from Great Britain and settled first in Montreal then eventually made their way to New York, who were really intent on climbing the social ladder. Those are Judith's words. They didn't have a lot of money but they wanted more and they wanted to cement a certain kind of social status for the family that had to do both with actual wealth and with privilege.
More than that, it had to do with appearances and who they wanted to associate themselves with. Judith's mother, in particular, expected her daughters (Judith was one of two daughters of the family) to be incredibly feminine in an almost Victorian sense of that word, which meant managing a household or performing femininity in a way that didn't get one's hands dirty. You didn't clean your own home, you didn't cook your own food, you certainly didn't make your own beds or raise your own children and change their diapers. It was this idea that the less physical and domestic labor you engaged in, the more ladylike you could be in the eyes of society.
Judith, from a very young age, really felt in her gut that that was not for her. She had a hunger for life. She was interested in poetry and verse. She was interested in food, as was her father who had grown up in Montpelier, Vermont with a little more of a looseness around his sense of where he belonged in society, part of which had to do with his family's longer wealth, a bit of older money, which gave him more security and a bit more of a sense of play. Also, he was a man, which meant that he didn't have to perform in the same way, though certainly he did.
Judith talked about it being her father who really helped her crack the door toward sensual pleasures, including food. He would sometimes sneak her out to little French restaurants on the weekends and that gave her a sense that there was a world of food that was interesting, that was beyond the regimented world of her New York household where no one was supposed to touch the food (in terms of preparation) except for those who had been hired to do so and that one didn't talk about the food and how it tasted at the table. That was as taboo and as verboten as talking about sex.
At the remarkably young age of 11, she managed to convince her parents to let her spend a year in Vermont at her grandmother's. How did that experience further develop her relationship to food?
I love this story of Judith because I feel like the Judith I knew in her late 80s and early 90s was still this and very completely 11-year-old. The story goes that she had flunked the entrance exam for a very tony and very expensive private girls high school in Manhattan so she made a bargain with her parents. She had been looking to get out from under her mother's thumb. She loved spending time with her father's family in Vermont, and she came up with a bargain where she would go live with her grandmother in Montpelier for a year, save them the year's worth of tuition they would have had to pay in order for her to repeat the eighth grade. She would attend the local public school and she would save them all this money.
At this point, the Great Depression was raging. The family was trying to hold on to their property in New York. They were trying to tighten their belts. So they saw it as an economic decision but Judith understood that this was a way of buying herself more freedom and autonomy. Judith went off to live with her grandmother for the year.
During that year, her grandmother also struck a bargain. Judith had a deal to uphold, which was she needed to pull straight A's, she needed to do her homework, she needed to go to school, she needed to be diligent. As long as she did those things, and as long as she found a way to make the time, her grandmother really supported her independence and autonomy, and also helped her get up to some mischief. For example, she'd send her off riding her bicycle all through the streets in Montpelier, something Judith never would have been allowed to do in Manhattan. She went horseback riding through the fields. She had sleepovers at her aunt's house who would serve these lavish breakfasts of popovers that Judith slathered in heavy cream and jam. Her grandmother would take her to the cinema every week and they would have milkshakes at the local soda fountain afterwards.
I think at a very early age, Judith began to come up with her own rhythm for how a person might balance fun and pleasure with really hard work and began to have an understanding that you didn't have to choose one or the other, that they could be held in balance in a life if you were able to organize your time in such a way that made it possible.
She eventually comes back to New York after this period with her grandmother. She does get into the tony school. She graduates and she starts her collegiate career at Bennington. As part of their curriculum, Bennington expected the young women to do what we would call an internship. So at the age of 17, she created an opportunity for herself in Manhattan, working at Doubleday. She ends up going back there as a job after graduation. Could you talk about the wartime period a little bit and women's roles when the war was over, what they were expected to do and how Judith flew in the face of this?
Judith's first time working at Doubleday, as you mentioned, which was during her very first year at Bennington College, fell during the early World War II years. Most of the male editors at Doubleday, which at the time was the largest publishing house in the English-speaking world, had gone off to war. Doubleday still had books under contract, they still needed to continue generating revenue if they were going to stay afloat. Many publishing houses had folded during the Great Depression [but Doubleday] had pulled through, so they needed to fill editorial seats.
Judith came by way of a family connection. She had no experience doing editing of any kind but she really did have an ear and an eye for voice and story, just coming through her own reading life in her early years. She was plunked into a seat at Doubleday, she was handed manuscripts by Kenneth McCormack, who was newly editor in chief, and she was told to figure out how to work on them with no training and with no oversight. What that allowed her to do — though it might have terrified some, I think it really invigorated and enlivened Judith — was it permitted her to follow her instinct and figure out how to suggest changes in a manuscript as a reader, not as someone who'd had any kind of formal training as an editor or publisher. That was her first stop.
She goes back to college, the war ends, she returns to New York, and she returns to Doubleday a couple of years after she had graduated from college, in which all of those men, the ones who hadn't been killed in the war, had come back to Doubleday and then some. The publishing house had continued to grow. The reading public and the appetite for books in the United States had grown voracious during the war years. So when Judith originally graduated from college and looked to Doubleday to give her a job again, they didn't offer her one because they were giving men priority. It took a couple of years and it took her putting a couple of feathers in her cap at other houses, including a short stint at Dutton where she worked with Gore Vidal, to end up getting herself a job at Doubleday again, where she stayed until she left for Paris in 1948.
One of the huge successes of Judith was her ability to cultivate authors and create an enviable network. One colleague of those years, Betty, said that while her work persona was prim and disciplined she had a spicy social life
Yes, she did.
After Doubleday came Paris, where she headed with introductory letters to André Malraux, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Yes, it's remarkable. She didn't end up spending much time with those three men. Most of them were too busy to see her. But those letters helped her get a foot in the door with other people who she then made powerful and important connections with. That snowball effect carried both personally and professionally throughout her long life and career. As you say, this idea that Judith was always keeping her ear to the ground, was always awake to the possibility that anyone she met could be a colleague, they could be an agent that she might want to work with, they could be an author that she could develop a story with. Because her receptors were on to that, it is part of what made her life and her career so remarkable.
Judith Jones became intimately connected to the lives and stories of those she edited, says Sara B. Franklin. Photo by Katrín Björk.
During that time in Paris, she meets the man who will become her husband and falls in love, Evan Jones, and he becomes her co-conspirator in food exploration. Tell us briefly a story of their time in Paris, maybe the pop-up.
Well, this is not with the man who became her husband, actually. This preceded him. This was her first French lover, a guy named Pierre Serria, who she had met through a connection of a connection of one of those letters of introduction that you alluded to earlier. He was a freedom fighter during the war who had started working for a news organization. He was a passionate and talented home cook and it was he who taught Judith how to cook French food at home or gave her her first introduction to it, at least, first in her apartment and then in a grand apartment that Judith moved into with another American boy who had a real crush on her. His aunt had lent him this vast, almost palatial apartment that was sitting empty in Paris, except for the painter Balthus, who had a studio in the back of that apartment. You can't make this stuff up.
They had this big apartment, they both liked to eat, they thought it would be fun. It was a caper. In order to earn their keep, they decided to throw a pop-up supper club out of the apartment. Judith's lover was the head chef. Judith was kind of his headline cook. And this poor guy called Jaden who's following Judith around like a puppy dog did all the grunt work. The three of them together put on this show. The first night was a hit and people started asking, "When can we come back again?" Judith made a date for two nights later. As it turned out, her lover, Pierre, was not available that night so Judith helmed it herself, just pulled up her pants and decided she could do it. And she pulled it off.
Judith ended up working with the man who became her husband, Evan Jones, at Weekend magazine, which was the glossy arm of the US military's newspaper, Stars and Stripes, which had just relocated to Paris, and were way in over their heads with a weekly magazine. She had called on her last hope and a prayer to find work to stay in Paris. She was running out of cash, her parents said they weren't going to help support her anymore, she was supposed to be home months earlier. This was the last name she'd been given and she called up the magazine. They said, "Yeah, come on in for an interview. The boys could use some help."
Everyone else there was a male. She was the only woman in the office and she was just doing odd jobs. She quickly fell in love with the man she had been assigned to work with, Evan Jones. I refer to him in the book by his name, Dick. That was the name that she knew him by early in those days and that everyone else called him by but Evan was His byline.
One of the reasons that Judith said she recognized a kindred spirit in Dick was that he took her out to lunch and asked all these questions that expressed a deep curiosity in the food. [He asked] the waiter in his stumbling, clumsy French. She found it so endearing, not only that he was willing to be brave with his French but also that he had a genuine interest, that he was interested in the food on his plate, how it was made, where it came from, the stories behind it, he seemed interested in the server. All of that was so reflected in the life that the two of them built together, which included so much research and learning and writing and cooking together in their home back in New York.
There are paragraphs in your book that astonished me, like the one in which you drop in a couple sentences that she did odd jobs for Ludwig Bemelmans with whom I'm obsessed, an artist and the author of amongst many books, the Madeline series. I mean, what a life.
What a life. She had this wonderful ability and desire to put herself into exciting places with interesting people at the right time then stick around long enough to see what she could make of it.
Let's talk about Judith and Knopf. When did she finally land there? Who did she work for? And how did they think of her? At the beginning, who was she editing?
Judith was hired at Knopf in 1957. It was Blanche Knopf who hired Judith as her assistant editor because Blanche had found out that Judith was responsible for Doubleday's publication of The Diary of Anne Frank in English. Doubleday had originally rejected it and Judith, when she was living in Paris, had made a case for her boss to look again, thinking it was a remarkable historical document but also that Anne Frank's voice was singular as an author. Of course, she was right, as history has proved. That book was a publishing phenomenon.
Blanche Knopf had badly wanted to publish that book but all of her colleagues, one of whom was her husband, the house's co-founder, Alfred Knopf, all of them had poo pooed the idea. They believe the book would never sell. They had much the attitude that Judith's boss in Paris did, which was that it was a diary by some young kid.
Blanche had a hugely contentious relationship with her husband and with many of the senior editors. She had experienced tremendous misogyny in the publishing house. She was, by many measures, the life and soul of Knopf. She'd scouted talent overseas. She had remarkable literary taste and cultivated relationships with legendary authors but she was not given equal respect and treatment. So she hired Judith as a real spite move, in some ways, towards her colleagues but also because she had this idea that if this young woman was floating about in New York publishing, she wanted her to be under her thumb rather than competing potentially against her.
In short order, Judith was given over to working on the translations of Camus and Sartre. She never edited either of those authors directly but she was working with their translators in English. She began working with Elizabeth Bowen under Blanche Knopf's name. She began working with John Updike under Alfred Knopf's name and very quickly became his chief editor and also was given John Hersey within her first two years. Also, in her first two years, she on her own became Sylvia Plath's American editor and her only American editor and also acquired the manuscript that became Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
This giant manuscript of Mastering the Art of French Cooking is plunked down on her desk. Nobody at Knopf is interested. They think cookbooks are not worth their time or their intelligence so she's given the gift of being left to her own devices with it. Do you think that Mastering would have been published let alone be as successful as it was, if Julia hadn't found Judith, this soulmate in food, a woman who felt so comfortable cooking and talking about food and for whom she completely understood Julia's desire to explore that part of sensuality?
We can never know for sure, but I certainly don't think the story would look the way it does in history and that is borne out in the letters that I saw in the archives between Judith and Julia. Almost immediately, one recognized in the other this incredible shared vivacity, sensuality but also a fastidious attention to detail and a willingness to work until something was absolutely perfect. They truly became collaborators in the revision of that manuscript.
It took over a year between acquisition in the signing of the contract, and the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the fall of 1961, in which the book almost got rewritten for what, in truth, was the third or fourth time. When Judith bought the book, she made very, very clear that it was nowhere near ready for publication yet and that they had a tremendous task ahead of them. So no, I don't think the story would be the same. Also, when it came to marketing and publicizing Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Judith Jones was a one-woman show at the beginning of that book's life.
She hand-sold it to what we would now consider the who's who of people in food in New York.
It's absolutely right. She called Craig Claiborne at the New York Times, who she'd never met, and she cold-called James Beard who she had never met, and that put her in touch with Dione Lucas, who she had never met. Together, those three people helped launch that book into the world. Certainly Julia Child and her co-authors deserve a great deal of credit there, too. They spent a lot of time doing demonstrations and going on what is considered one of the early cookbook tours. But Judith really had this idea that she was going to do whatever it took to get that book in front of people, including making interesting deals with someone like Craig Claiborne where she took them out to lunch and he seemed uninterested in the book and he seemed more interested in her and the way she was living. And she said, "Okay, well, you can do a story on my husband and me as long as you take a look at my cookbook."
I would love to concentrate on the books after Mastering. The books that she subsequently acquired and the relationships she built with this group of women are the books that were fundamental to me as a young woman, as a cook. She acquired books from Claudia Roden and Madhur Jaffrey. Her involvement in the books' development went way beyond editing the word. She basically acted as a recipe tester and she got involved with these women who became her friends. Was that unusual at the time? And did the way she created these relationships make her cookbook style unique in that it allowed the authors to reveal more of themselves on the page?
Absolutely, I think you just nailed it. Judith became intimately connected to these women and their lives and stories, which allowed her, as an editor, to pull out more anecdotal detail that might otherwise have been left out of these books. Because she spent so much time with these women in their kitchens and in Judith's own kitchen, cooking together, shopping together, in some cases traveling together, she had the relationship grounds from which to say, "I'd like you to put that story down on the page." That kind of detail and intimacy is part of what's reflected in those books and part of what has made them so evergreen. They feel personal. They feel particular to someone's life and region. They don't have this kind of ambient geography. They feel highly specific. I think it's a huge part of what has made them last and persist in our cookbook culture and our food culture at large.
Publishing was, and still is, remarkably white. Tell us about her introduction to Edna Lewis and the book that came out of it.
Edna Lewis was a Black woman born in rural Virginia in 1916. She was a bit older than Judith. Judith had, to date, only one Black friend in her entire life. That was someone who had been hired as the family's domestic when she was a child, this woman, Edie, who Judith said was tremendously influential. It was decades before she became close again to a person of color and that person was Edna Lewis. They were worlds apart socioeconomically, in terms of the geographies that formed them in which they had lived most of their lives, in terms of how they grew up, and Lewis grew up cooking for her family on a wood stove. She was the one her mother plucked out of the order to be the family's cook.
Part of what made that book, The Taste of Country Cooking, which came out in 1976, so remarkable, was because Judith had to reach across a divide of unknowing, it compelled her to ask more and deeper questions. The more Judith talked to Edna Lewis, the more she realized she didn't know about her own country that she had grown up in and the cultures that had shaped it. She had grown up in such a white, elitist Northeastern bubble, that as that relationship unfolded across the early 1970s, Judith really became humbled in recognition of how little she knew about other regions of the United States and other cultures that had contributed to what we now think of as American culture and American food. I'm going to go ahead and say on record it's my favorite of all of the cookbooks that Judith edited.
"The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America" details one woman's influence on a budding cookbook industry. Photo courtesy of Simon & Schuster.