TTT Interviewee: Judith Jones Session #1 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City Date: April 27, 2009 Q: This is Judith Weinraub. I am with Judith Jones in her apartment in Manhattan. It’s April 27, 2009, and we’re about to start. Good afternoon, Judith. Thank you for having me here. Could we start by your telling us a little bit about when and where you were born specifically and a little bit about your childhood? Jones: I was born in New York City, and, actually, when I was four years old, we came to this apartment building that we’re in now. It’s one of the old buildings. About six families got together and bought it, and we weathered the Depression just barely. And it’s sort of fun to have come back later in life. Now I’m the matriarch of the building. But it’s full of memories for me and particularly memories of some of the shops that we went to. I remember Mr. Volpe’s grocery store, and in winter you had about five things, a couple of old gnarled root vegetables and onions and potatoes, and that was about it. Q: Where was that? Jones: It was on—I think it was, 65th and Third. We’re on 66th. Q: Everything’s changed so much. Jones: Yes. But then you lived with the seasons, and I remember the excitement when the first asparagus would come and the peas, and there was nothing but iceberg lettuce in those days. And we had a maid of all work. It was amazing what those maids did. She made three meals a day and cleaned up, and she cleaned house and so on. Q: The woman that you write about did all the cleaning as well as all that spectacular cooking? Jones: Yes. And she had a little room back there, which is now my study, and I just was fascinated by her, I think partly because I loved to watch her cook. I think it’s in the genes. I mean, my sister didn’t give a hang about cooking, but I would come home from school and perch myself in the kitchen and watch Edie cook and ask her about the kinds of things that she ate because— Q: She was from Barbados? Jones: Yes. Yes. Our food was strictly good English food, you know, no garlic. Q: No garlic, no onions, nothing. Jones: No onions. We would get just enough onions for a lamb stew, enough for one portion each, but bad to have them left over, because they might sneak into something else. Q: I’ve never understood why they bothered people. Do you have any idea why your mother didn’t like them? Jones: I think there was a certain snobbery— Q: Oh, interesting. Jones: —that you smelled of onions, you smelled of garlic. You know that next morning smell of garlic that you get on the metro in Paris. [laughs] It was frowned upon, because the whole attitude towards food then was that it was good fuel, and you bought carefully, you had a balanced, good diet, but that was it. You weren’t supposed to enjoy it, at least the English tradition, the Puritan tradition. Q: You must have thought about why that was the case. Jones: Why it was? Q: That you weren’t supposed to enjoy it or talk about it. Jones: Well, I do think it went back to Puritan things, to Puritan attitudes. Anything, the physical was just, yes, you do it to keep alive. Like sex, how you have to procreate, but you’re not supposed to enjoy it. [laughs] And I really think that, and then the fact that in the nineteenth century the food industry got very smart about the food business and exploited this idea that women didn’t really want to cook, that it was demeaning, that we were supposed to be educated, and you just didn’t want to spend all that time in the kitchen getting your hands dirty. And people bought it. Then I love the way they tried to turn cooking into a science, domestic science. Jim Beard is so funny on that subject. Q: We can talk about that a little bit later. What about that do you think appealed to your mother? Jones: What? Q: The other, the food science or that she didn’t belong in the kitchen? Jones: She just didn’t want to be in the kitchen. It was demeaning. You didn’t cook; you had servants who cooked. I’m afraid it’s very snobbish—my mother came from an English family that went to Canada and then came down to the U.S., and I just think the attitude was deeply rooted. Whereas on the other hand, my father’s family in Vermont—both his sisters lived within six miles of each other—had such a lusty feeling about good food. I just remember loving that. My aunt’s husband was a local doctor who made the rounds every night, and came home late. She would cook the most delicious little things and have them waiting, and I could see how much it was an expression of love. Q: This was your Aunt Marian? Is that right? Jones: My Aunt Marian. Q: And you would spend summer occasionally there, or how did you— Jones: We always went to Vermont all summer long for a good three months. There was a polio scare, and they had to get the children out of the city. Q: Oh, of course. Jones: We stayed the summer in Montpelier, where my father grew up. The rest of the time we were on a lake about an hour away. Q: And did your aunt do her own cooking? Jones: Oh, absolutely, and she had a hired girl, as they say, but she wouldn’t let that hired girl do the cooking for her. She did the cooking for my Uncle Doc. It was an expression of love, and I think very early on that got to me. I also wrote in my book, but I think I’ll tell you again here, about my grandmother’s house, a big house on State Street and Bouley Avenue, they used to have these—I don’t know what you call them, in the ceiling so that the air could circulate—these vents, and I’d be upstairs where I could open the vent and look and see what was happening in the kitchen. I remember one night looking down, and these scruffy-looking men were sitting at the table. Mrs. Cooney, the cook, said to me afterward, “Well, those are poor, lonely men out of work, and your grandmother told me always to feed them.” And she said, “There’s a mark on the elm tree outside that tells other hobos,” as they were known, “that this is a safe place, and they’ll always give you a meal.” Then she showed me the mark on the trees. I can remember that. I almost wanted to cry—I sensed that this is what it’s all about. Q: It must have been an astonishing idea, really. Jones: Yes. Q: When you were here in New York, nevertheless, you did grow up with things, perhaps because of the fruits and vegetable vendor, that some people didn’t have, or certainly that I didn’t grow up with. You talk about artichokes as being a favorite food. You had innards. You had things that have recently become back into fashion. I was just interested that they were part of your family diet. Was that Edie or was that— Jones: Well, I think it was Mr. Volpe, the Italian on the corner, and I think he probably introduced them to us. But I don’t know, because my mother didn’t go out shopping. She’d get on the phone. It was very much the style those days. So, about artichokes? I suspect it was old Mr. Volpe, and they were just becoming a little bit fashionable because they served them at ladies’ lunches, to be eaten leaf by leaf. If you didn’t know how to eat them, you learned fast in order to be socially correct. Q: And what about the innards? Jones: Well, that’s English. Lamb kidneys, veal kidneys, sweetbreads. We didn’t have brains. We didn’t have tripe. Q: Have to be French for those, I guess. Jones: And, of course, liver. Liver was good for you too. Q: Could you talk about the occasional Saturday lunches you had with your father? Jones: Yes. Just down the street, I think it was East 60th or 61st, there was a little French restaurant called La Petite Maison, and my father liked good food, and I guess he sensed that I did too. He would start to take me to lunch on Saturdays, and we particularly liked this La Petite Maison. Q: This is just you, not your siblings or— Jones: Well, sometimes the whole family went, but he and I would maybe sneak off together—we had a very close relationship—and say we were doing some shopping, and then we’d stop in. Unfortunately, there was one particular thing I loved, which was a seafood crepe, and the idea of rolling up wonderful seafood in this little pancake, thin pancake appealed to me, but unfortunately I got sick, and really sick. I mean, I was throwing up. And Mother just stood there and said, “Well, what do you expect? It’s French food. They’re disguising things that are rotten.” [laughs] Anyway, item by item, we sorted out the culprit and it came down to scallops, and a lot of people have an allergy to scallops. But the thing that I loved is that my husband, who grew up as a Christian Scientist —although he no longer was one, it had shaped his thinking about certain things—he wouldn’t accept that someone had an allergy and couldn’t get over it. He wasn’t trying to poison me, but he would slip a little bit of scallops into a fish stew, and a little more next time, and after a period of years, he confessed what he was doing. Q: Oh, you didn’t know? Jones: I didn’t know. Q: Oh, what luck. Jones: Yes. And one night I was able to eat a whole plate of scallops, and I’ve been making up for it ever since. Q: In this atmosphere, how did you learn anything about cooking, yourself? Jones: I learned by watching Edie more, and I learned with Aunt Marian, because she would have me make things. She’d say, “Whip up the eggs.” So those were the two big influences. I don’t know. I was just sort of brave. When we were in college, during summer vacations the parents of a friend of mine let us live up on Riverside Drive because the parents’ apartment was empty, and so we were two or three bachelor girls together, and we loved giving dinner parties. And I did all the cooking. I don’t know where I got it from. Q: That’s amazing. Well, go back a little bit. At one point, you asked to cook for your father during the summer. Jones: Oh yes. Q: How old would you have been? Jones: I think I was about fifteen. Q: How did you get the nerve to do that? Jones: I don’t know. It’s very interesting how little you know yourself, and when I came to write this book, I looked at some of the letters I wrote home when I was in Paris—I’m, jumping ahead a little bit—and thought who is this girl? How is she so confident, so manipulative, so sassy? [laughs] But I don’t know. As a child, I was more or less the shy one, but I was very determined. And I loved the Vermont side of my family, so I really wanted to stay with them one winter, just to have that experience of going to school in the snow. Q: What was it about them that was so different from your New York family? Jones: I think they were just warmer and more partying and fun, and my grandmother was quite naughty. She was always trying to get me away from my homework so we could go to the movies together. Q: Oh, how grand. Jones: And we’d have a big milkshake across the street at Jackson’s pharmacy. See, she had that childish naughtiness in her. Q: Now, speaking of milkshakes, you wrote about a very embarrassing incident to you when you were a child when you were put on this scale by someone. Jones: Oh yes. Q: Could you play that out, put that in context a little bit? I thought it was an incredibly cruel thing to do to a child, but you tell us. Jones: Well, it was supposed to be just a joke. First of all, my mother and her sister—they’re both slim—used to kind of pinch me and say, “Oh, she’s going to be the plump one of the family. She’s a Bailey.” Well, of course, I liked being a Bailey. That was my father’s name. But the plumpness kind of bothered me, and I didn’t really think I was plump. Then I went to visit a schoolmate—Eleanor Freedley—and visit her parents. Vincent Freedley was a well-known theatrical producer then and had this wonderful house in Connecticut. They always served fabulous food—I can remember iced tea and little sandwiches out on the lawn and the huge dinners. I was just thoroughly enjoying myself when Mr. Freedley said to me, “Do you always eat this much?” Or, “Do you always eat this way?” Then he said, teasingly, “How much do you weigh?” I don’t know, I said, a hundred. Maybe I was about a hundred and fifteen then. And he said, “I don’t believe it,” and he took me in to his bathroom and put me on the scales, and I went. I weighed over a hundred and twenty, and he came laughing back. But, you know, I didn’t feel so terribly humiliated. I just felt I’m somebody who has to watch her weight. Q: And you were a young teenager? Jones: Yes. Q: In the middle of a big meal, I might add. [laughter] So there were a few pounds in you that might not have been at other times. Jones: Yes. Q: How did you then deal with that? Jones: Well, at school I was awfully strict with myself. I literally had something like a raw carrot for lunch or an apple or— Q: How did you do that? Jones: I don’t know. I couldn’t do it now. Q: Do you remember it being difficult? Jones: Yes, I do. I do. It often leads to anorexia, and I might well have been susceptible. But I never went too far. I never upchucked. [laughs] Q: And perhaps it was partly because it wasn’t your own family where that incident took place. Jones: Then I think what I really learned later is that it’s important to eat in proportion to your weight, your appetite, how much energy you use. I learned all this in France, I mean, that if you just eat well, a little of everything, you’re okay. Q: What about your years at Bennington, what was the food like there? Jones: It was extremely good, because I think I picked Bennington for its food. I visited Wellesley, I visited Smith, and the dreary food put me off. Bennington prided itself on fresh-squeezed orange juice every morning. [laughs] Q: Oh, that’s fascinating. Jones: I sometimes waited on table. I didn’t do much of it, but you could see that they got the produce fresh from the farmers, and then during the war they had a victory garden. Kenneth Burke, the literary critic, would be out in the fields with his students. He loved conducting his classes out there and having our hands in the soil while our minds were soaring. Q: Your book makes it seem a little bit as though one of the reasons for going to Paris was to learn more about food and to perfect your skills. Is that all fair enough? Jones: I don’t think it was quite conscious, but I loved everything about Paris. I loved the way women treated their men. I loved the— Q: Ah, now that I’m not going to let you just drop off without explaining. [laughter] We’re all eager to hear. Jones: These English women in my family were always setting such high standards, and they were so critical. They’d be measuring the drinks that their husbands had, and they’d be having them carve the roasts so thin that you hardly got anything. It was so anti-pleasure, anti-lustiness. And I, obviously, had that streak in me, so I loved the way the French enjoyed life. Q: Was deciding to go there an easy thing to do, a bit of a rebellious thing to do? Jones: Well, I think it was quite rebellious to have stayed. The initial trip was to be three weeks, it was extended slightly, and then I ended up staying three and a half years. My parents were, I think, quite concerned about it. Q: Concerned about your being, as it were, alone? Jones: Alone, vulnerable, all those Frenchmen around. [laughter] Q: Right. But you seemed to have—at least the book makes it seem as though it was a fairly easy relationship with the city. Jones: Oh, it was. As far as I was concerned, I just decided that—my purse was actually stolen about three days before I was to go home. You could hardly say stolen, because I put it on the back of the bench and just wandered off. Now, Freud would not say that was exactly— Q: The bag wanted to stay in Paris. [laughs] Jones: And it had everything in it. It had my passport, my travelers’ checks, my identity. Suddenly, I just thought, “That’s the past. I’m going to make a new life here. This is a message.” And that’s what I think my family had a little hard time with. Q: How did you tell them or ask them? Jones: I didn’t ask them; I told them. I said, “I’m staying and I’m finding work and this is where I want to be. Believe in me.” So they didn’t come over and get me forcibly. Q: At that point, well, you’d only been there a brief period of time, but surely you saw the wonderful food markets and the way people shopped and ate. Talk about how that fit into your image of a new life. Jones: Well, to me, the food was celebratory. They enjoyed the pleasure of it. The time the French would spend marketing! But they would never count the time. I mean, they loved going to the charcuterie, the patisserie, the open market. I remember one French woman told me, “When you first see things, never, never buy when you go the open market. You go the whole length of it and back again before you buy, and then you have the comparison.” Well, that seemed so terrific to me. And then one day in the local boulangerie, I was standing in line to get bread, and suddenly a man broke open a baguette, and he cheered. Q: Oh, my. Jones: He passed it around to the other people, and the whole place was roaring. I said, “What’s happening? What’s this about?” And somebody said to me, “The flour is white.” To me that seemed the essence of life. [laughs] Q: Could you explain? I mean, you know by now that the bread had a bad period, both before and after the war when there wasn’t white flour. But did you realize that that— Jones: Well, it was explained to me that the flour wasn’t white, that the flour had been impure all through the war, everyone had been getting gray baguettes that didn’t really taste good. I also can remember some of the dinner parties there, and the idea of food and wine and good talk and the literary life were all a part of it. Q: Now, you went with some pretty good connections, invitations to people to call, so that people who were established there could help you make your way around the city. Did that make it easier? Jones: Yes. Oh, it certainly did, and the people were so generous. I mean, they wanted to show this young American around. I had met Arthur Koestler here in New York, and he sort of took a fancy to this young girl going off to Paris, and told me what kind of wine I should order and gave me all these letters of introduction. One of them was to [André] Malraux. Q: That’s pretty good. Jones: Yes. Q: On a scale of letters of introduction. Jones: I never heard from [Jean-Paul] Sartre, and I did get a little handwritten note from [Albert] Camus. Just as well he wasn’t in Paris. [laughs] Q: I hope you saved it. Jones: I don’t think I did. Q: But Malraux? Jones: Yes, Malraux. He turned to his assistant secretary and said, “There’s this young American. Will you help her meet some people? He meant the people who had worked in the Resistance and wanted to get together at the end of the week. So I was taken by his young assistant and I met all these wonderful Frenchmen. One of them was a very good cook, and he just loved showing me how to cook, how to market, how to order in a country inn. There is something about the French that— Q: In retrospect, was that also a kind of seduction, I mean purposefully, or really he was just trying to show you? Jones: Well, it may have been a little bit of seduction too, but it was just who he was. He was a hardworking journalist, and yet every night that he was alone. (I think he invariably had a woman.) He would make a lovely little dinner, and he just enjoyed it as part of life. Q: Do you remember if that had happened before you decided to stay or after? Jones: I had met him before, yes. Q: Ah. Jones: Good question. [laughs] Yes, I remember that. Q: I can understand that. What were your cooking skills like at that point? Jones: Well, they probably were just minimal, because, you see, I hadn’t found in any books or magazines or anything about the techniques of cooking, what makes the difference between just cooking even with good ingredients and sort of throwing it together as against making something soigné, as Julia [Child] always said, And to me that was always part of the fun, even if you just have a few leftovers in the refrigerator, to turn them into something that you feel, “Mmm, isn’t that good?” after the first bite. Q: But looking back, did you have basic skills that you could feed yourself with? Jones: Yes. By then I knew how to roast and how to do pan chicken and things like that, but there were so many unfamiliar things, particularly in the whole fish area, and I would ask the fishmonger in Paris, “What would you do with a dorade?” And he’d tell me, and sometimes he’d bring out his wife. I remember once the butcher had sold us a little piece of beef, and he said, “Oh, you have to have pomme frites with this.” And I answered, “But I don’t make very good pomme frites.” So he replied, “Talk to my wife.” And he took me over to her, and she told me the proportion of beef fat to pork fat that I should use and gave me a little canister of it. What a difference that kind of thing can make. Q: But still very brave for a young cook really to try pomme frites and new kinds of fish. Jones: Yes. Q: It’s interesting to me that you went really from an atmosphere where you couldn’t talk about food to an atmosphere where people talked about food all the time. Jones: That’s right, yes. Yes. Yes. Q: And it must have felt—I don’t know, you tell me. Jones: In these letters home, I said to my parents things like, “I know you didn’t send me to an expensive college to have me become a cook, but in France cooking is an art, not frowned upon, but honored.” Putting them in their place. [laughs] Q: Did you get much response on that? Jones: Well, I didn’t keep the letters from them. [laughter] Q: I asked you about your skills at that point because I want to ask you about the dinner parties, but I wondered, before you tell me about your dinner parties where people paid, what your skills were like at the point that you decided to do that. So if you could just describe how all that came about and where. Jones: Well, yes. I went to the American Express, which was almost a kind of a club for Americans in Europe at that stage, and I met a young man who’d worked at Doubleday, where I had worked. I was supposed to go back to a job there. I told him my plight, that here I was with no money, no job, no apartment. And he said, “Well, listen, come and live in my aunt’s apartment. It’s huge, and there’s only a painter living down the hallway.” The painter turned out to be Balthus, whom, of course, at that point I’d never heard of, of course. And he was very welcoming. We even got a little dog. [laughter] I didn’t do so much cooking for them, but I did a little. Then Paul [Chapin] all of a sudden had this idea, he said, “You know, here we are. We’ve got a free apartment. All we need is enough money to eat, and you cook pretty well, and you’ve got this French friend you keep talking about.” That was the journalist I’d met through Malraux’s secretary who was such a wonderful cook. “Maybe he’d help us, so we can feed others in order to feed ourselves.” And there were lots of Americans, homeless Americans, who would love it. So we gathered all the little tables around Paul’s aunt’s apartment and found little tablecloths and empty champagne bottles. (He had another aunt who’d married into the Moët & Chandon family.) Q: Handy if you need champagne bottles, yes. [laughter] Jones: I asked Pierre, the journalist, if he would like to help us. He just loved the idea. Q: Could Paul cook? Jones: No, not at all, but he could éplucher and do some of the prep work, which is exactly what we did. We became the slaves, and Pierre would waltz in early in the morning and take me to the market, and I’d hold out the bags. He’d plunge this and this in, and I’d ask, “What are you going to do with this?” And he’d reply, “Soupe de poisson.” So all afternoon, Paul and I would be putting the fish flesh through one of those little fine tamis strainers-- all just for a soup, which seemed quite mad, but lots of fun. And then Pierre would join us at about seven o’clock and whip up the dinner, and we’d have about twenty people. Q: How did you find them, the twenty people? Or who found them? Jones: Paul had lots of connections, and they were mostly Marshall Plan young Americans living nearby. Q: So people more or less in the same age group? Jones: More or less, yes. One evening my cousin came over—she was married to John Gunther. And that was quite an evening, because, of course, Pierre was fascinated to meet the great John Gunther, and it was my way of sort of proving to the family that I had become at least a sous chef. Q: Did you actually learn a lot about cooking during that period of time? Jones: Oh, I learned a lot watching him, and I came to understand how important shopping is. Pierre wouldn’t make up his mind what we were going to have until we got to the market, practically. Then one night, it was only about the third or fourth time we’d served dinner, Pierre was called out of town, and so I made the whole dinner. [laughs] Q: And you shopped for it yourself, or he had already done that? Jones: I think we shopped for it. It was fairly simple--it was a chicken dish. But it was pretty nervy of me. Q: And people actually gave you cash, or how did that work? Jones: Yes, they paid for it. It was a prix fixe, and we were only open twice a week. We may have tried to get up to three. I can’t remember. But, of course, it wasn’t long before the concierge caught on. Paul’s aunt, the Princess Caetani was in Rome. She was the person who sponsored a literary magazine called Botteghe Oscure, and she was quite the character. She came on the train, and when she arrived, of course, I was trembling. But she took us out to lunch, Paul and me, and she— Q: That’s a fairly classy thing to do under the circumstances. Jones: Yes, and never a word about the restaurant. She just remarked to me, “I hear you’re quite a good cook,” she said with a certain amount of contempt. Then she just added that—I think it was her daughter or a niece was having a wedding and a lot of people were coming so we’d have to get out. [laughs] But never, never confronting. Q: Saving face for everyone. Jones: Yes. Q: And where did you go then? Jones: Oh, lots of different places. First we went off to the south of France for about a week or so, sort of to recover. I just sort of lived hand to mouth. Q: The book has this story that you tell about how you made a list of people to contact to get a job and how your future husband was the last on the list, and you heard a friend speaking to him and then grabbed the phone. I have tried to put that together in my head, with some difficulty, in terms of then what did you do, what did you say to him when you— Jones: I just said I was looking for a job and I’d heard wonderful things about— Q: What was it he was running at the point? Jones: It was a magazine called Weekend. It was a Life-like magazine, and he had started it with Stars and Stripes right after the war, and it was quite successful in Germany. He got a lot of good German talent and wonderful photographers to work for him. But then I think the Deutsche Mark was devalued, and Stars and Stripes felt they couldn’t afford to keep the magazine afloat. So the men on Weekend all put in their savings into it, and they decided to move to Paris and give it a whirl. Q: I see. They had been in Germany. Jones: They had been in Germany. They had about two years of publishing it in Germany. Q: I see. So by the time that you had this conversation with him, how long had it been in Paris? Jones: Only a month or two, I think. Yes. Q: Oh, I see. Jones: It was very early on, and they actually had to change the name, they found, because Weekend was already used. So they changed it to Now. So under those circumstances, all I had written down was Evan Jones and Weekend magazine, which was no longer the right title. And Jones is a pretty common name. [laughs] So I didn’t have much to go on, and I’d crossed off on the list all the other prospects I’d seen. They were very polite, but there was no job. Then one evening I walked into my little fleabag hotel, where there was just one phone in the lobby-- there were no phones in the bedrooms, and I heard this American on the phone saying, “Weekend, Weekend.” From what I heard of her conversation, she was an artist. Fortunately, she wasn’t competing with me for an editorial job. So when she was finished, I grabbed the phone and asked “Could I speak to Mr. Jones?” And they put me on, and I guess he liked the sound of my voice. Q: Was this in the same building, his office? Jones: Oh no. His office was on the Rue Saint-Honoré. Q: So you made an appointment or what? Jones: For the next morning. Q: Oh, I see. I see. Jones: Right away. Yes. And they didn’t have any money, but I think he took sort of a liking to me and gave me a small salary. Q: And you did have some publishing background? Jones: Oh, I did, yes. I brought some copy I’d written on Gore Vidal’s book and some things that were published in the Bennington literary magazine. Q: How soon was it that you realized you shared an interest in food with your future husband, that is to say? Jones: How did we find out that we did? Q: Yes. Jones: Well, I think it was the very first lunch that we had together. And I do remember this so clearly, because there was something on the menu called boudin blanc, and I didn’t know what that was and he didn’t know either. So we asked the waiter, in our stumbling French, and it was explained that at Christmastime they made this special boudin sausage of poultry meat and veal and, of course, truffles and cream, and it was just heavenly. Even more so because we both felt the same way about the pleasure of discovering something delicious and caring. Q: I guess what I hadn’t focused on before is that Evan must have made a decision to stay in Europe as well as you had, so that you— Jones: Yes, he’d had a rather painful separation and his wife had gone back to America with the two children. In fact, when I went into his office, it was his second daughter’s birthday, and all over the office were pictures of her that the German photographer Hans Hubmann had taken. It was so touching. Q: So his children were where at that point? Jones: They were actually in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Q: I guess what I’m getting at is that he had decided not to make his life in the United States, I mean not forever but— Jones: Well, at least to stay on in Paris for a while, trying to keep the magazine afloat. Then that didn’t work, really, because suddenly the whole magazine market opened up, and poor old Weekend Now couldn’t compete with Life and Look. [laughs] Q: No. Jones: So it went under, and he wanted to stay. We both wanted to stay. I think he thought it would be sort of healing to be away for a few years. Q: Yes, and how long was it that you both stayed? Jones: It was almost three years. Q: At what point during that time did you get married? Jones: Not till the end. [whispers] And we were living together. [laughs] Q: Did your family know you were living together? Jones: Well, my mother finally came over. Q: She caught on? Jones: She wanted to inspect. Q: I see. Jones: And we were living with a wonderful French woman named Madame Damianos. We had a bedroom and use of the kitchen. I told Madame Damianos that my mother was coming and asked her what was I going to do? And she said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take all monsieur’s clothes and I’ll put them in my closet, and we’ll give a lovely dinner party for your mother and aunt,” and so that’s what we did. My mother was looking around. [laughs] I don’t think she was ever fooled. Q: I think mothers tend to catch on. Did the two of you make many trips either around France or around Europe? Jones: We didn’t travel as much as we would have liked because we had no money. And, you know, I think I learned a lot by not having money because I absorbed the way the French how you make use of every little thing. And I was cooking more because both of us were cooking together, and we had fun making it work. Q: At what point did you start to work for Doubleday, in Paris, that is? Jones: I don’t think it was until 1950. I was there about a year. They opened an office and sent— Q: You mean you were only at Doubleday a year or so, is that what you mean? Jones: Yes. Doubleday opened an office in Paris. The man who was sent over, Frank Price really wanted to have a few years in Paris, I think, so he got Doubleday to splurge on an elegant apartment cum office, and through various people we both knew, I got wind of this. So he hired me as his little assistant. Q: So how did this little assistant find a copy of the Diary of Anne Frank? Jones: Because Frank said one day that he was going off to lunch, and there was a pile of manuscripts to be returned. Among them there happened to be an advance copy of the French edition of The Diary of Anne Frank. It hadn’t been published yet. And he just said, “I’ve looked at them, there’s nothing worthwhile here.” So I was sitting there, writing rejection letters, and then I picked up this book and it had her face on the cover. I was just drawn to it, and I spent that whole afternoon until dark reading the book, and I was still there, just living that story when Frank walked in. I just said firmly, “This has to go to New York. They’ve got to publish it.” And he said, “What?” Q: I was about to say, yeah, and? Jones: “The book by that kid?” But, you have to understand the other side. First of all, not much was being talked about the Holocaust then. It was still— Q: Yes. What year would this have been? Jones: It was just before ’51. And that’s one factor. And the other is an adolescent girl writing about this? It’s so easy for editors to turn things down. You have piles of stuff, I learned later that it got rejected by I don’t know how many—four or five—publishers in New York. Whereas I had the good fortune to be sitting in that apartment. Q: So you were reading it in French? Jones: Yes. Q: But they had sent copies; that is, the family or the European publishers had sent copies to New York to various publishers as well, or no? Jones: It had been shown in New York, yes. And it may have been shown at the Frankfurt [Book] Fair? No, I think that that came later. Q: So how long was it between the time you read the book and that Doubleday released it in English, ballpark? Jones: Eight, nine months, probably ten months. Q: Oh, very fast. Jones: Yes, ten months, probably. Well, it had to be translated, too, so it may have been even longer than that. But it was released before I came home. So I must have seen it in ’50. Q: Did you get credit for a kind of star turn? Jones: Not really. Its impact grew. I do remember that Otto Frank wanted to keep the dramatic rights, because, as he said, “I can’t bear to think of somebody playing my little Annie.” Then, of course, you know what happened with—what was his name? Meyer Levin? Well, he was very manipulative, and talked Otto Frank into letting him take over the dramatic rights. But I don’t suppose I really got particular credit, but that didn’t seem important. I’m sure it’s why Blanche Knopf hired me later. Q: Well, that’s really what I was wondering was, when you worked at Knopf, if it gave you a certain weight or something, that it made your recommendations look like sound recommendations when you made them. Jones: Yes, and she was looking for somebody. She’d just fired an editor. There was lots of that going on in those days. It was very much like a squabbling family. If you went against her wishes or Alfred’s, you were out. Q: So when the manuscript for what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking came in—well, first of all, could you describe what it physically looked like? Jones: Yes. I had been at Knopf then for, let me see, probably a couple of years. I was pretty much Blanche’s editor, because she had bought a number of French books after the war. Q: You were editing them into English? Jones: I would be working with the translator, which, to me, it was fun. It was challenging to get good translations. I had worked on just one little book on food that the Knopfs had acquired, but it didn’t really occur to me that this would be a part of a literary career. There was still that separation, if you know what I mean. The “cookbook editor” was looked down on. Q: Oh, absolutely. Jones: When I was at Doubleday, I remember Clara Classen, who did only cookbooks—dreary mostly made up of boxtop recipes from Pillsbury, that kind of thing. So this manuscript was dumped on my desk simply because everybody knew I loved to cook and had lived in France, and they thought I’d be interested. Q: So could you describe what it was that was dumped on your desk? Jones: Well, it was a huge manuscript. I don’t know that I actually have the numbers, but I’d say it was at least seven hundred pages, by a Smith College girl and two French women nobody had ever heard of. But I immersed myself in it, and I could see how very well thought out it was. There was nothing like it, and it gave me exactly what I was saying earlier that I was missing and couldn’t find anywhere, and particularly when I came back from France and wanted to cook here. Q: Meaning technique? Jones: The technique and also ingredients (there were so many things then that you just couldn’t get). Nobody had ever heard of shallots. There weren’t fresh mushrooms. There weren’t any herbs. Remember—you wouldn’t remember this, how garlic came in a nasty little box. Q: Oh, it still does in some places. [laughter] Jones: Those little desiccated heads. Q: Yes. Jones: The book told you what to do if you might not be able to get these ingredients, how to bring up other flavors. It just seemed magical to me. I was absolutely convinced that it was going to change the way America cooked. I really felt that. To me, what the men had said at Houghton Mifflin, that the American woman doesn’t want to know this much about French cooking, just seemed not true. Suddenly for the first time even little secretaries were going abroad, and the G.I.’s had been in Europe and the Far East, and they came back with their taste buds awakened. And I just felt that this was going to be—I don’t know. You only measure something out of your conviction, don’t you? Q: Yes. I guess I—when did I look at it first? I’m not sure. I think probably I didn’t buy mine until something like 1965, something like that, so I missed the beginning. In other words, by the time that I bought it, it had a buzz. But it’s interesting to me that you had enough confidence in this manuscript as something that would make money for Knopf that you— Jones: Well, we weren’t as money-minded then, but I absolutely believed that it was something that would have an impact on cooking in this country. Not that it was going to be a Fannie Farmer or a Joy of Cooking, but that if I felt this need and that it had been answered in this book, there must be millions like me. I mean, I think you have to go on that instinct. Q: Do you remember if the Elizabeth David books had been published? Some of them must have been published in England by that point. Jones: Yes. We actually published one Elizabeth David book, for which I was the designated editor. You can’t even say that I worked on it. I just put it through. Q: But this was prior to? Jones: No, this was after. I’m pretty sure it was after. I’ll have to check those dates. But, you see, Elizabeth David didn’t do what Julia did. Q: Technique, definitely not. Jones: She didn’t try to make us understand. In fact, she was pretty darn careless. I remember once writing to her that I tried a recipe and the filling was two or three times what you needed to fill whatever it was, I don’t remember, peppers or zucchini—and she just wrote back and said, “Oh, you Americans, you’re so exacting. Just use the filling up in something else.” Well, that’s hardly helpful to the novice—she was very high-handed. Q: Yes. I met her once. Yes, she was. So how long a period of time did you and the trio work on Mastering, or was that exclusively you and Julia? Jones: By then, Bertholle was pretty much out of the picture, and I didn’t really work directly with Simone Beck, known as Simca. But I would ask things. I remember once that I was trying to get them to do a cassoulet, because I just felt it was such a quintessentially French dish and also so marvelous, but I didn’t know what I was getting into. I just opened up a can of worms, because only Simca knew what went into a true cassoulet and Julia, da, da, da, da. There must have been a file about two inches thick devoted to that one recipe, with letters flying back and forth. Simca would refer to me as Madame Jones in this, but I didn’t deal directly with her. Q: Okay. So going back to getting this big manuscript, and in your book you write that you tried the recipes right away. Jones: Oh yes, even before I recommended it for publication. The results were just miraculous. Q: Do you remember which ones you tried first? Jones: Well, yes. I know I tried the boeuf bourguignon and that’s when I became convinced. They explained the cuts of meat we should use and how to translate the French cuts to what you could get in the market here. Then the fact that you dry the meat, and if you use butter it’s going to burn. Also that you have to keep the pieces of meat separated so that they will brown, not steam. Nobody had ever put that kind of thing down, and it just made a world of difference. Q: You cook with every cookbook writer that you’ve worked with, don’t you? I mean, it seemed throughout the book [The Tenth Muse] that you always cooked their recipes. Jones: I do, because that’s the way you help the author to establish his or her voice, that you make it something special unto its own. Q: Explain what you mean, though, about how cooking the recipes helped you help establish a writer’s voice. I mean, how does that work? Jones: Well, if you’re cooking with them, you always learn useful tricks and you encourage the author to explain in her own words. I just did something from Madhur Jaffrey’s exciting new book on Indian cooking, made up of surprisingly easy recipes. Her ideas for simplifying are wonderful. But I just made one dish last night, and you have all these wonderful seasonings that you rub into a piece of fish. And then she has you brown the fish in quite hot fat. Well, do you leave all that marinade on? She doesn’t say. So I did one with and one without. Q: Oh, my. Jones: It’s just a small point, but I don’t think I’d have picked it up if I hadn’t tried it. And then these spices, because they’re in pieces, they tend to blacken when you brown the meat if you’re going too fast. So just in that one little recipe, I had about three questions, and if I don’t ask, I don’t think I’m being as helpful. Q: Do you actually cook everything? Jones: Oh, no, no. Q: No. But just in general. Jones: Yes. Q: Let’s go back to Mastering, for a second. It took a while to tame it, didn’t it, to wrestle it into publishable shape? Jones: It was miraculously well thought out by Julia. Q: Really? People describe her as so organized. Jones: Yes. She had organized the book of having the ingredients of a recipe on the column to the left and to the right of the text, appearing as they are used. This, to me, was so intelligent, particularly because when the recipes are as long as they are in Mastering, you don’t want to be going back with your greasy fingers searching for the ingredients. And that was all worked out. No, it was an amazing manuscript. Julia had spent years on it. And also, she had learned to cook relatively late in life, so she knew all the questions to ask, and she was obsessive about getting it right, trying it out, comparing. Q: So how long a period of time was it that you were working on the book? I mean, “you” plural. Jones: I would say it was that last winter when they’re in Scandinavia. I think it was about six months. Q: That’s a lot of work for six months. Jones: It may have been longer. I’d have to look at that whole file. But then, you know, the whole process of publishing a book, particularly a cookbook, now takes almost a year. Q: Meanwhile, your colleagues at Knopf, how were they reacting to your spending your time this way? Jones: Well, I think Blanche resented it. I think the only way I survived at Knopf was that I became a football between Alfred [Knopf] and Blanche. [laughs] And Alfred kind of took me under his wing. He really appreciated my love of food, because he was, you know, a wine and food man, a member of various wine and food societies. He made a ritual of uncorking the wine at dinner. So I think he really was behind me. Q: I want to talk about many of the other cookbooks, but I’m also curious to know at what point you began your fiction editing responsibilities, how you’ve woven both aspects of your career together. Jones: Well, I went there as a general editor and, as I say, it was very much of a family business, and they were very possessive about their authors so that they really liked it when they were the acquirers and you were assigned to work on the book. And it was okay by me. I mean, to me it was thrilling to be working on Elizabeth Bowen and Albert Camus, and who cared who brought it in? So I think I was in a very fortunate position in that sense, and then little by little, I acquired my own authors, once I had established their confidence in me. Q: But were these two threads, your cookbook editing and your fiction editing, concurrent? Jones: Oh yes. I think you acquire books on subjects you’re interested in. I edited some biography and what they used to called belles lettres in the old days. I did quite a bit of poetry. I was a general editor. Q: Was the time you spent on being a general editor more or less equivalent to the time you spent on cookbooks? Jones: No. There’s no question that a cookbook takes a great deal more hands-on attention, whereas with John Updike—I became his editor early on. Q: He didn’t require the same amount of work. [laughs] Jones: I knew right away I wasn’t going to tell Updike what to do. So, part of editing is sheer diplomacy. Q: How much time did that absorb, the second volume of Mastering? Jones: I was much more involved in that, in the planning and the choice of material--what was missing from the first volume. By then Julia moved to Cambridge, and I’d go up and spend a couple of days working straight through the day, morning, noon, into the evening. Q: So when you say you were more involved in the planning, what does that actually mean? Jones: Well, what we should have, what was missing or seemed too difficult in the first one. It was my idea to have them do a French bread recipe, for instance, because, hard to believe, but at the time you could not get a good baguette. It just didn’t exist in New York. When I suggested that Julia work out a recipe, she assigned it to her husband, Paul, because she remembered that he used to bake bread. So she said, “Paul, you better the bread. Play with it.” And he literally sent me two or three times a brown box filled with two or three of his baguettes, and you’d open them, and Evan and I would just laugh. They looked like the gnarled limbs of an olive tree. [laughter] So pathetic. And finally, when he gave up, Julia just said, “Well, we’re going to go to France. We’re going to meet the best French bread teacher, and we’ll take our flour and the salt and the yeast and everything we would use here.” Q: The American flour? Jones: Yes, American flour. To see what it was that was making such a difference. Q: How long did it take to work on and then produce volume two? Jones: I bet we were working on it a couple of months, easily, easily, maybe more. Q: Now, I took a look at—your wonderful assistant, Ken, provided me with lists of your cookbooks, because I asked if there was a list of anything in chronological order. He said, “No, no.” Both from this and from reading your book, I—let me just think for a second here. I looked at Roy Andries de Groot, one of them. Where would that be in here? And Michael Field. I guess I looked at Culinary Classics and Improvisations because I couldn’t find All Manner of Food, and I looked at Feasts for All Seasons. Jones: All Manner of Food was really a collection of his magazine pieces. Q: I see. Well, in any case, the books that I looked at, what interested me was that the way the recipes was presented was not the same as Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but that you seemed to have, I don’t know, learned something about the way to present recipes from that previous experience. Now, maybe I was, you know, imposing that on you, but I wondered if you— Jones: Well, I think I just instinctively learned how important it is that the person who is that’s technically telling you what to do and explains the various techniques is right there in the kitchen with you. But not everyone has a Julia Child voice—or should have. Q: No. Jones: For instance, Claudia Roden’s recipes are much, much more succinct. Technique is not that important, at least in Middle Eastern food. There cooking is much more spontaneous, open to interpretation. What’s important there was this sense that she had of connecting to the past through these recipes, and you get a wonderful feeling of the women of the household all getting together and gossiping and sending a little basket down onto the street to buy the goods and then pulling it up to their kitchen.. So that I have always encouraged that side of Claudia. Actually, her first book was done when I acquired it. And the same with Madhur Jaffrey. And Irene Kuo. To me her book is the best book there is to help you on really learn about Chinese cooking. She would start thinking about why you velvet a piece of chicken as against slippe-- coating it, and the words just came out. I mean, she did have a writer helping her, but the words came from her. The collaborator would watch Kuo cooking—that’s why the descriptions are so hands-on. If she had just hired a writer and handed over some recipes, it wouldn’t have worked. Q: I mean, each of those cases, they came from cultures where the food was an important part of the culture and where there was good home cooking where they came from. Jones: Exactly. Q: So I wondered if you could talk about how important that is to a cookbook. Jones: It is, because food triggers memory, too. I mean, even when I make a little dish for myself, I’ll remember it from childhood, and when I sit down and eat it, part of that pleasure is in the connecting, isn’t it? Q: Yes. Jones: It’s an emotional thing. I’ve always encouraged that when that’s an important part of the story, and it almost invariably is. Q: In a way, does it have to be that there’s a longstanding connection with the food of their cultures, of the authors’ cultures? Jones: Does it have to be? Q: Yes, does it have to be a component, in your eyes, to end up with a good cookbook? Jones: I think it’s important. But what happened was that suddenly food was the big thing and everybody was writing on everything, even a book on zucchini. I think my measure has always been: does it make a contribution? And I’m just not interested in one more book on zucchini or— Q: Does it make a contribution and, presumably, the writing style is an element as well. Jones: Oh, very much so to me, yes. Lidia Bastianich is a good example. She had had a couple of cookbooks published before I took her on. Actually I had a chance at her first book, but I didn’t like her collaborator who imposed his own voice, who was writing with her. He used to be the restaurant reviewer at Gourmet—an old boozer. Do you remember him? Q: Old boozers rarely make for good colleagues, but anyway. [laughs] Jones: So I turned it down, but then some years later they—and she had a couple of books that were fine, her agent submitted her latest proposal to Knopf, and I welcomed the chance to work with her. I said to her, “I want to come and watch you cook. I’d love to get more of you on paper.” And then just watching her, I’d ask questions, “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that?” And she loved it, of course. I mean, she said, “Judith released me.” [laughs] I’d sometimes get recipe headnotes from her, written at two in the morning when she’d done the rounds of her restaurants and driven back to Long Island. Then she’d be at her computer writing. She’s just amazing. Energy is a big asset. Q: What about food memory? Do most of these writers have a good food memory? Jones: Oh, I think so. Yes, very definitely. Q: Do you? Or did you when you started all of this? Jones: I think so. I have a very keen sense of association [that food kindles]—I mean, you could say “bread pudding” to me, and I can have a memory so sharp that it that it can almost bring tears. But I can’t remember everything I ever ate, which Jim Beard could. Q: Some people, yes. Do you take notes at all about dishes you’ve had at restaurants or other people’s homes or memorable meals? Jones: I will sometimes if I’ve had something unusual—I remember the first time I had at the Four Seasons a dish of delicious brains, and Seppi [Renggli], who was the chef there, was a friend of Jim Beard’s, and Jim was on a diet. [laughs] So Seppi would cook for him and I would order something he particularly recommended of course. Jim’s fork would sneak over onto my plate, and we both agreed they were the most marvelous brains. Seppi told us that he painted them first in mustard and then covered them with breadcrumbs. That’s all he told us, so I went home and played with it, until it tasted almost as good as his. It’s now one of my favorite, wonderful dishes. Q: Do you find, though, that you need to take notes to remember things, or not necessarily? Jones: I’m not a big note-taker. I used to take lots of notes when Evan had an assignment and we were traveling together, because he liked to get people to talk so he was free to give his full attention. You do need notes, or today it’s taping, to have a record of what was said. So I do have lots of little notebooks of our trips. Q: We can come back to some of these books, but why don’t we talk about how you met Jim Beard. Jones: Oh, oh, oh. The first time I ever saw James Beard, I think it was—I still remember it was in a big basement room in the Lexington Avenue Hotel, and he was promoting Scotch Buckets. [laughs] I just liked him. I mean, even though he seemed pretty hammy promoting those plaid buckets, he was obviously being paid to do it. But the first time I talked to him was when Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out, and I just had the audacity to call people and say, “This book is remarkable. Do take a look at it.” And you have to remember that there weren’t many remarkable cookbooks then. He was open to talking to anyone who called and he said, “Send it down to me.” When he’d read the proofs, he phoned and said that he thought it was a masterpiece, and then he said, “We’ve got to introduce these people to the food community. We’ll have to give a party.” And he immediately flew into action. Then he said sheepishly, sort of at the end of this conversation, he said, “I wish I’d written it.” [laughs] Q: Then he did give a party, yes? Jones: Yes. He got Dione Lucas to give a party at her restaurant, the Bread Basket, and she was slightly drunk and very coquettish. Q: What kinds of people were invited? Jones: Well, you know, the food community was a handful of people. Q: At that point. Jones: Clementine Paddleford. Helen McCully, Craig Claiborne. Q: Yes. Not the kind of huge things that today’s books— Jones: Oh no. Q: Then how did your relationship with Beard, such as it was, develop? Jones: Well, we became friends, obviously. I’d often ask him for advice, even before we had become friends—I had forgotten this—I sensed that there was a whole new wave in the sixties, the counterculture, who were all making their own bread. It was the big thing, and I felt there was a need for a good bread book, that a mastering the art of bread. So I called up Jim Beard and I asked him to have lunch with me. I took him to quite a posh place and brought up the subject. He said, “That’s a good idea. You’re absolutely right. I’ll think about it.” Q: You told him that you were thinking of having such a book done as opposed to— Jones: Yes. And I was asking him who would be the right person to do it, because he knew the food world much better than I did. So he said, “I’ll think about it.” A few months went by, and I said, “Have you thought?” And he said, “Well, let’s have lunch together again.” So we had about four of these posh lunches. [laughs] At the end of it, he said, “I thought about it. I’m almost through with my American Food. I want to do that book. I’m the person to do it.” So I said, “Great.” Q: Had that gotten to be your intention? Jones: No, it really hadn’t. In fact, I wasn’t even that sure that he had that kind of analytical mind that I wanted for this, I mean, really dealing with all the basics. But it turned out he was just wonderful. I remember we did a basic recipe, and I got about six people around Knopf who’d never baked a loaf of bread before to follow the recipe and they all brought in the results. You can’t imagine how different they were. [laughs] And took the loaves down to Jim, and he cut them open and examined each. Then he wrote a section—it runs about a page and a half—entitled Remedies For the Not Quite Perfect Slice—point by point, analyzing what might have gone wrong if the slice sags or is damp or has baked unevenly. His analyses are not only extraordinarily useful, but reflect his whole gentle, encouraging personality—he’s never cross with you, he never makes you feel like an idiot. Q: You mean the recipe does reflect that? Jones: He gives a recipe, and then he says that if this goes wrong, if that goes wrong, how to correct it. Q: I see. Jones: And this all came out of what went wrong when those people at Knopf made exactly the same recipe. Well, you’ve made bread. You know that it’s never exactly the same way twice. Q: Never. Who was helping him with that book? Jones: I think it was José Wilson. I got to know her very well, and saw how she dealt with his restlessness. I’d send him a book, and he’d have read it by the next day. I’d go down to his house on West 12th Street with my list of things that we were going to be doing that morning, and after about the fourth item, he’d begin to get restless. If the phone rang, he could hardly stand it and he’d stop listening to me. Then he’d pick up the phone and he’d say, “Yes? Uh-huh. Abigail from Kansas City. Now, tell me, dear, what happened when the oven blew up?” or something. [laughs] He loved it. Q: Now, you worked on him, according to these lists, on these books. I wasn’t sure what you had done. I mean, there’s Beard on Bread, Beard on Pasta, The New James Beard. I wasn’t sure what you had done with Theory and Practice of Good Cooking. Jones: What I’d done with it? Q: I mean, in other words, were you in on that from the beginning? Jones: Oh yes. We kind of cooked up together. Q: Oh, tell me about that. That’s very interesting, then, because when I looked it up, I couldn’t find much written about how that came about. Jones: Well, I realized what a good analytical mind he had and what a lot of knowledge he’d accumulated, and I just thought he could explore the theories of cooking and how we practiced them. I wanted a book that was American oriented. I mean, it’s not French, it’s not Italian, it’s not any one thing. So it is organized through techniques, such as boiling, braising, dry heat, frying, sautéing, and so on— Q: So it was your organization? Jones: Yes, pretty much. Jim and I really cooked it up together, but it was my concept, and he liked the idea. And at that point he was also doing those monthly pieces for—what airline was it? Was it American Airlines? Q: There were so many of them. I don’t have that list with me. Jones: And he was writing about this kind of thing, so it helped. It gave him ideas for the book. Q: So how long did it take to massage a spine for it into shape? Jones: Oh, I bet we worked on that well over a year, and José would be there to do the final writing. But she wasn’t always there when I went down to his kitchen and we would get carried away talking, so it helped to have her around. Q: She could write it down. [laughs] Jones: Yes, she could write it down. Q: When you went down there, were you talking, cooking? What were you both doing? Jones: Yes, we would be working on the book, but Jim loved to talk too. He would love to tell you about the opera the night before, a little gossip, and the book he’d read when he’d come home. [laughs] He was a like a naughty boy sometimes. He hated to be pinned down too much. I’d have to say, “Jim, let’s go back to braising.” Q: Now, at that point in the publishing industry, could you more or less spend whatever time on these books that you wanted? Jones: Yes. Nobody ever questioned. And quite a lot of it out of the office. Q: And would that be the same today? Jones: Today? Q: Yes. Jones: I think so, yes. You’re pretty much responsible for how you use your time. And, my god, I used to work hard in those days, because I’d be reading manuscripts most of the night. My family can still remember my being up at one in the morning finishing a book that Blanche wanted me to read immediately. Q: I know we’ve mentioned this, but at the time you were working on this Theory and Practice, you would have been doing whatever other fiction work or other belles lettres work at the same time? Jones: Yes. Q: It’s a lot to balance. Jones: Yes, probably. I don’t remember, I had so many books one year. I think I had something like nineteen books I was editing. Q: Oh, my goodness. Jones: Yes. Because I’d get assigned things, as well as the things that I was doing. [unclear], fortunately. Q: Fortunately? Jones: Well, I’m withdrawing. I mean, I haven’t bought new things for a year or so. [End of interview] Jones – 1 - PAGE 1