"She fought herself with vigor and conviction from the first sentence to the last"

 

Writing, for her, was an agonizing ordeal. Writing is hard work for almost everyone: for Katharine it was particularly hard, because she was by temperament and by profession an editor, not a writer. (The exception was when she wrote letters. Her letters -- to friends, relatives, contributors -- flowed naturally from her in a clear and steady stream, a warm current of affection, concern, and eagerness to get through to the mind of the recipient. Letters were easy. How I envied her!) But when she sat down to compose a magazine piece on gardening, faced with all the strictures and disciplines of formal composition and suffering the uneasiness that goes with critical expression in the public print -- this was something else again. Gone was the clear and steady stream. Katharine's act of composition often achieved the turbulence of a shoot-out. The editor in her fought the writer every inch of the way; the struggle was felt all through the house. She would write eight or ten words, then draw her gun and shoot them down. This made for slow and torturous going. It was simple warfare -- the editor ready to nip the writer before she committed all the sins and errors the editor clearly foresaw. Occasionally, I ribbed her about the pain she inflicted on herself. "Just go ahead and write," I said. "Edit it afterwards -- there's plenty of time." My advice never had any effect on her; she fought herself with vigor and conviction from the first sentence to the last, drawing blood the whole way. 

--E.B. White, on the writing process of his wife, The New Yorker editor Katharine S. White, in an introduction to her collected reviews of gardening catalogues, Onward and Upward in the Garden. 

I am thoroughly enjoying reading Katharine White's book, which is so clearly and bracingly written that she makes me wish I had the temperament and interests to be a gardener. E.B. White's introduction, however, is what resonates most with me; I believe I must be an editor at heart. Katharine's agony of composition is all too familiar to me. Almost everything I write is born in painful labor, whether brief and intense, or prolonged and draining. I'm often happy to have done it, but oh, the process!

After Katharine's death, E.B White granted a rare interview, in which he recalled their marriage:

Mr. White described his love affair with Katharine Sergeant Angell as "stormy." He added, "She was a divorced woman, but a conscientious mother with two children. I was six years younger than she. We finally went off and got married one day." That was in 1929. Years thereafter, he was to write: "I soon realized I had made no mistake in my choice of a wife. I was helping her pack an overnight bag one afternoon when she said, 'Put in some tooth twine.' I knew then that a girl who called dental floss tooth twine was the girl for me."