A manuscript came back to a house in Connecticut with a printed rejection slip. The story carried the title “Friend of the Family.” The writer who had mailed it read the note, set the pages aside, and after a while slid the same pages into a fresh envelope and sent them to the same magazine. She changed not one word. The second time, The New Yorker took it. The story ran in 1993 and became a chapter of her first novel two years later.
That sequence holds much of what a reader needs to understand about Katharine Weber (b. 1955). She held no high school diploma and no college degree. She trusted her work over the verdict on it, and the verdict came around.
The instinct ran in the blood. On her mother’s side stood the world of Broadway and the banking houses. Her maternal grandmother was the composer Kay Swift (1897–1993), the first woman to score a complete Broadway musical, and for a decade the close companion and collaborator of George Gershwin (1898–1937). Her maternal grandfather was the financier and political writer James Warburg (1896–1969), heir to a German Jewish banking dynasty and an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt. On her father’s side stood the garment trade. Her paternal grandmother sewed buttonholes for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in the months before the fire that killed a hundred and forty-six workers in 1911. One grandmother sat at a Steinway. The other sat at a sewing machine on the ninth floor of the Asch Building.
She grew up in Forest Hills Gardens, the Tudor-styled planned community in Queens that Frederick Law Olmsted‘s firm laid out for a certain kind of striving family. The houses had leaded windows and slate roofs and covenants. A child raised there learned to read the markers of class before she could name them. Music came through the house from the Swift side. So did the long shadow of Gershwin, dead before her mother had finished growing up, present at every holiday as anecdote and grievance and unfinished business.
Weber attended The Kew-Forest School and then Forest Hills High School, and she left in her junior year. In 1972 she entered the first class of the Freshman Year Program at The New School, an experiment built for students who wanted books more than they wanted credentials. She studied later, part time, at Yale. She never collected the diploma. She turned the gap into a thesis, that the work decides the writer and the writer decides nothing by sitting for examinations.
In 1976 she married Nicholas Fox Weber (b. 1947), a cultural historian from Hartford who ran the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. She had been Katharine Swift Kaufman, carrying her grandmother’s name through the middle of her own. The couple settled in Connecticut, and from 1977 they lived in Bethany, beside the foundation grounds, where they raised two daughters, Lucy and Charlotte.
The Albers connection gave Weber a rare apprenticeship. She had already held editorial and research jobs at Harper & Row, at the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and for the architect Richard Meier (b. 1934), whose offices ran on the conviction that white space and proportion carry meaning. Now she worked for the foundation that kept the legacy of Josef Albers (1888–1976) and Anni Albers (1899–1994), the Bauhaus painters who had taught at Black Mountain College. She assisted Anni Albers and did archival work. The Alberses had spent their lives on the proposition that color and thread and the square hold their own logic, that craft is thought. A young writer absorbed the lesson and carried it from the loom to the page.
She built her trade through reviewing. Through the 1980s she wrote newspaper columns and served as books columnist for Connecticut Magazine. She reviewed fiction for Publishers Weekly for several years, the unglamorous bench work of judging other people’s sentences against a deadline. Her own essays and reviews ran in The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Vogue, The Chicago Tribune, and The London Review of Books. A reviewer learns where the joints of a book give way. Weber learned, and then she set out to build books a reviewer could not pull apart.
The first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (1995), took its title from the warning printed on a car’s side glass and made it a study of obsession and the tricks of perception. The book moved through fragments and shifting vantage points. It announced a writer interested less in what happened than in who saw it and what the seeing cost them. The Music Lesson (1999) followed, a taut book about a stolen painting and a woman alone in an Irish cottage, told in the close first person, the reader trapped inside a mind that might not be telling the truth. The Little Women (2003) handed the narration to an unreliable young woman reconstructing the breakup of an affluent Connecticut family, with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women sounding underneath like a second melody. The New York Times Book Review named all three Notable Books of their years, a run that placed Weber among the careful builders of her generation. In 1996 Granta put her on its list of the Best Young American Novelists.
Then she wrote Triangle (2006), and the apprenticeship and the lineage and the method came together.
Picture the ninth floor of the Asch Building on a Saturday afternoon in March 1911. The cutting tables run the length of the room under hanging shades. Bins of fabric scraps sit beneath them, oil-soaked, packed tight. Hundreds of young women bend over machines, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants, some of them children. The owners keep the Washington Place door locked against theft and union organizers. A cigarette, a scrap bin, a draft, and the fire goes up the airshaft and across the floor in minutes.
“The pails,” a forewoman shouts, and the women throw the fire pails, and the water does nothing. “Down the stairs,” someone calls, but the stairs fill with smoke and the locked door holds. The single fire escape buckles and drops its load of bodies into the alley. The elevator runs until it cannot run. At the windows the women take each other’s hands and step out into the air above Greene Street, and the crowd below watches them come down, and the firemen’s nets tear like paper.
Weber’s paternal grandmother had stitched buttonholes in a room like that one, in the same trade, for the same company, shortly before. The novelist did not write the fire as a documentary. She wrote it as a problem of memory and evidence. The book turns on Esther Gottesfeld, the last survivor, an old woman whose account of her escape has shifted over ninety years, and on a feminist scholar who suspects the account conceals something, and on a composer who tries to set the disaster to music. Weber built the novel out of testimony, transcripts, a song, a granddaughter’s doubt. She let the record contradict itself, because records do. She trusted the reader to sit with what cannot be settled.
Triangle won the Connecticut Book Award for Fiction and earned a place on the longlist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Critics took it for her finest work, and the judgment has held. The book does what the Albers loom taught and what the reviewing taught: it treats construction as meaning. The form is the argument.
Her later fiction kept the method and moved the subject. True Confections (2010) gives the floor to a woman who married into a family chocolate company and now narrates its history as a legal deposition, a confession, and a sales pitch all at once. The novel takes apart the manufactured story, the founding myth a brand sells about itself and the founding myth a family sells about its own loyalties. Still Life With Monkey (2018) turns to a man left quadriplegic by a car crash, his marriage, his service monkey, and his wish to die. The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review and Kirkus Reviews praised its restraint, the refusal to sentimentalize a subject built for sentiment. It reached the finals for the Connecticut Book Award and the New England Society Book Award. Jane of Hearts and Other Stories (2022), with the novella The Ring at its center, gathers linked stories around recurring objects and the buried wires that connect lives the characters think are separate.
Between the chocolate and the monkey she went back to the grandmother who sat at the Steinway, and she told the truth about her. The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family’s Legacy of Infidelities (2011) is biography, family history, and music criticism braided into a memoir. Kay Swift left her husband, James Warburg, the children’s grandfather, for Gershwin. Gershwin never married her. He died at thirty-eight of a brain tumor, and Swift kept his music and his memory for the rest of her long life. Warburg married and divorced and married again. The infidelities of the title run down the generations like a recessive gene, and Weber traces them without flinching and without revenge.
The book carries a public stake beyond the family. Since Swift’s death in 1993, Weber has served as trustee and administrator of the Kay Swift Memorial Trust, the office that preserves a body of American music a less attentive heir might have let scatter. Under that stewardship came the restoration of Fine and Dandy, the 1930 musical that made Swift the first woman to compose a full Broadway score. A granddaughter who writes about manufactured myths chose to keep a real one in repair.
The teaching ran alongside all of it. Weber taught fiction and nonfiction at Yale, Goucher College, the Columbia University School of the Arts, and the Paris Writers Workshop, among other places. From 2012 through 2019 she held the Visiting Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College and served as a senior editor of The Kenyon Review. She sat on the board of Yaddo, the artists’ colony, and judged the PEN/New England Awards and the Connecticut Book Awards. The woman without a degree spent two decades handing degrees’ worth of judgment to people who had them.
A reader who wants a single key to Weber will not find one, and the absence is the point. Her novels use multiple narrators, broken chronology, documents, depositions, songs, and narrators who lie or forget. She resists solving her own mysteries. She wants the reader to feel how memory and language build what we take for fact, and she trusts that feeling more than she trusts a tidy ending.
The recurring subjects stay constant across thirty years: family inheritance, the lives of women, moral doubt, the making of art, historical wounds, and the border between private feeling and public history. The Triangle fire, a chocolate empire, a broken spine, the Gershwin circle. Each one she treats as a made thing to be taken apart and shown working.
The two grandmothers explain her better than any school could have. One built songs that outlived the man she loved. One sewed buttonholes in a room that became a graveyard, and survived it, and passed down a trade and a memory. Weber inherited the loom and the score, the buttonhole and the piano, and she spent a career proving that the made object holds the meaning, that the way a thing is built is the thing it means. She trusted the work over the verdict, the second time she sent the story out, and she has been right ever since.
Katharine Weber: Keeping the Dead in Repair
On a Saturday afternoon in March 1911, on the ninth floor of the Asch Building, the young women at the windows take each other by the hand. The fire is behind them and the Washington Place door is locked and the fire escape has already buckled and dropped its load into the alley. So they step out into the air above Greene Street, two and three at a time, and the crowd below watches them come down, and the firemen’s nets tear like wet paper. A hundred and forty-six die that afternoon. Most are Italian and Jewish immigrant girls. Many have no headstone the family can afford, and some are buried before anyone learns their names.
That is the terror, named in one scene. Ernest Becker (1924–1974) built two books around it, The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, and he held that every human culture is a defense against this. Not death alone. Two terrors, braided. The first is annihilation, the animal fact that the body rots. The second is worse and harder to say, the dread of insignificance, of having been a speck that left no mark, of going out the window into a crowd that cannot tell you from the girl whose hand you are holding. Becker said the work of every culture is to hand its members a hero system, a scheme by which a man might feel he counts for something that outlasts him. A way to earn what Becker called death-transcendence. A way to matter past the grave.
Katharine Weber’s paternal grandmother sewed buttonholes in a room like that one, for that company, in the months before the fire. Her maternal grandmother, Kay Swift, sat at a Steinway and kept the music of a dead man alive for sixty years. The novelist who descends from both spent a career on a single proposition about the two terrors. You defeat them by making a thing whose construction holds, and by keeping the made things of the dead in repair.
Watch how the hero system reaches her before she chooses it. George Gershwin dies at thirty-eight, and he does not leave the house. He comes to every holiday as anecdote and grievance and unfinished business, present in the scores on the piano, present in the grandmother who loved him and outlived him by more than half a century. A child in Forest Hills Gardens, among the leaded windows and the covenants, learns a lesson before she can name it. The dead stay if their made things stay. The score on the rack is a kind of body that does not rot. This is not yet a theory. It is a household.
So when Kay Swift dies, the granddaughter takes the trust. She becomes administrator of an estate that is music, and she keeps it in repair, restoring the score of Fine and Dandy so the 1930 show can sound again. The verb is the giveaway. You keep a thing in repair the way you tend a grave you refuse to let go green. Becker would call this the immortality project, the labor by which a person ties herself to something that does not die and borrows its permanence. Swift had done it first, for Gershwin. The granddaughter does it for Swift. The hero system reproduces down the line, mother to daughter, each one curating the made thing of the beloved dead.
Here the essay could name a rival and stop. There is no single rival. A sacred value is a word that means one thing inside one hero system and another thing inside the next, and the word that organizes Weber’s life refracts the moment you carry it across the room.
Take the made thing, the object built to outlast the body.
In a back room in Brooklyn a sofer sits over a sheet of klaf with a turkey quill and a pot of ink ground to a recipe a thousand years old. He is writing a Torah scroll. He has been at it for more than a year. When he reaches the Name he rises and goes to the mikveh first. His apprentice asks why he will not let a single letter touch another letter, why a hair of white space ringing each character is law. “If one letter cracks, if one touches its neighbor, the scroll is dead,” the scribe says. “Posul. You bury it. You do not fix it and pretend.” For the sofer the made thing defeats death by erasing the maker. His name appears nowhere. The scroll is not his. He pours a year of his hands into a covenant that was old before him and will outrun his great-grandchildren. The immortality is the community’s, never the craftsman’s. That is one meaning of the made thing.
Carry the value to a forge in Japan, where a swordsmith folds the steel back on itself a dozen times and quenches the blade in water at a heat he reads by the color of the dawn he works in. He signs the tang. His seal goes where the handle will hide it, seen only by the man who someday breaks the sword down to clean it. For the smith the made thing defeats death by transmission, the technique handed from master to pupil across four centuries, the blade a link in a chain of hands. The object is permanence, and it is also a weapon, built to end a life as it preserves a lineage. The made thing here carries no fidelity to any one dead person. It carries the forge.
Now a glass tower south of Market Street, where a founder pitches a room of venture partners. “We’re not building a product,” he says. “We’re building something that outlives all of us.” He means a company. The made thing defeats death by scale, by market share, by the founder’s myth printed in the business press. The object is a vehicle for a single man’s name written large. The permanence he wants is dominance, and he will burn the made thing of ten rivals to get it.
The sofer vanishes into his object. The smith hands his down a chain. The founder rides his to a personal apotheosis. And Katharine Weber does a fourth thing. She signs the book, like the founder, and she pours fidelity into it, like the sofer, and she builds it to last past her, like the smith, but the thing she will not do is let the made object lie. The founder’s myth is a sales pitch. The scroll cannot contain a flaw. The sword serves whoever holds it. Weber’s novel exists to expose the manufacture of the very belief that all three of them depend on.
Take a second sacred value, memory, and watch it refract the same way.
In a VFW hall with folding chairs and bad coffee, the survivors of a rifle company hold their reunion, fewer every year. A man reads the names of the dead from a laminated card, and the room stands. Afterward a younger man, a son, tells the old sergeant that the official history got a detail wrong, that the ridge was taken a day later than the citation says. The sergeant does not thank him. “You don’t get to change it,” he says. “You owe them the version we swore to. You keep it the way we keep it.” For the veteran, memory is loyalty, and to revise the record is to betray the dead. The sacred act is the fixed account, repeated word for word until the last man falls.
Down the hall of a hospice a nurse sits with a dying woman who is not afraid of dying. The nurse has seen this. She tells the daughter so in the corridor. “She’s not scared of going. She’s scared no one will remember she was funny.” For the nurse, memory is release, the story closed gently and let go, the window cracked an inch for whatever leaves. Remembrance is not the labor. Presence is. You do not keep the dying in repair. You keep them company, and then you let them be gone.
For Weber, memory is neither the veteran’s fixed oath nor the nurse’s gentle release. Memory is the unstable thing fiction exists to interrogate. Her novel Triangle turns on Esther Gottesfeld, the last survivor of the fire, whose account of her escape has shifted across ninety years, and on a scholar who suspects the shifting account hides a transaction. Weber does not give the reader the veteran’s sworn version or the nurse’s quiet closure. She gives the reader the survivor whose memory will not hold still, and she trusts the reader to sit inside what cannot be settled. The veteran keeps the dead by freezing them. The nurse keeps them by freeing them. Weber keeps them by refusing to pretend the keeping is ever pure.
This is the artist’s particular bid, and it is the most exposed of all of them. Becker took the point from Otto Rank (1884–1939), who saw that the artist tries to make the immortality project personal. The believer leans on the church, the soldier on the regiment, the founder on the market. Each borrows a permanence the group guarantees. The artist guarantees nothing. She has to justify the made thing out of her own hands, with no covenant behind her and no chain of masters and no quarterly report. When the unchanged story comes back from the magazine with a printed rejection, and she puts the same pages in a fresh envelope and mails them again and they are taken the second time, that is not stubbornness. That is the artist staking everything on the work against the verdict, because the work is the only altar she has built and there is no congregation to catch her if it fails.
Every hero system buries something to keep standing, and Becker called the buried thing the vital lie. Weber’s is hard to say because it wears the face of a virtue.
She spends a life keeping made things in repair, the grandmother’s score, the survivor’s testimony, the catastrophic injury rendered in Still Life With Monkey without a drop of the sentiment the subject begs for. The discipline is real and the restraint is hers. And the discipline might also be a flight. To keep the dead in repair through the object is to prefer the object to the person, the manageable score to the unrepeatable man who wrote it, the testimony to the girl who went out the window and whose name no one wrote down. Curatorship can be a second forgetting performed in the costume of remembrance. The made thing holds because the made thing is what a living person could not be, fixed, revisable, durable, yours. And the cost of building a life around the things that do not rot is the things that do. The unrecorded ordinary day. The presence the nurse practices, given to the living, in the room, before the window is cracked.
Weber is the maker who defeats erasure by construction and by fidelity to the dead, and who refuses to let the made thing lie about the loss it stands in for. The rivals she fights without naming are everywhere, the scribe who would erase the maker, the smith who would serve any hand, the founder who would inflate the myth, the soldier who would freeze the record, the nurse who would let it all go soft and gone. She has answered each of them in a book. The cost the ledger cannot price is the one her own discipline hides. A woman can spend her gift keeping the dead in such good repair that the living slip past.
Katharine Weber and the Logic of the Field
A literary career is a position in a field. The term belongs to Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), who spent his working life mapping what he called the field of cultural production, a structured space of positions set against one another, each defined by its distance from the others, each playing for a currency that is not money. The currency is recognition. Bourdieu named it symbolic capital, the credit a producer holds in the eyes of the people who count. A writer who wins it can afford to lose readers. A writer who loses it cannot buy it back with sales. Katharine Weber’s career reads as a controlled experiment in how that currency gets earned, banked, and handed down.
Start with the paradox at the center of her story, the one her admirers tell as triumph. She holds no high school diploma and no college degree. The field she entered rewards the credential. The university certifies talent, ranks it, stamps it. And yet the deepest belief of the literary field disavows the very thing the university sells. The field runs on a charismatic ideology, the conviction that the writer is born and not trained, that the gift precedes the schooling and cannot be conferred by it. Bourdieu called this disavowal dénégation, the field’s refusal to admit its own machinery. Weber’s missing degree, far from disqualifying her, fits the disavowal like a key. The autodidact confirms the field’s flattering story about itself. Her gap is not a handicap she overcame. It is a credential of a higher order, the proof that no credential was needed.
Bourdieu, in the essay “The Forms of Capital,” separates three. There is embodied capital, the dispositions a person absorbs early and carries as second nature, what he calls habitus. There is objectified capital, the books and instruments and art a family owns. There is institutionalized capital, the diploma. Weber inherited the first two in quantity and skipped the third. The habitus formed in Forest Hills Gardens, among leaded windows and covenants, taught her to read the markers of class before she could name them. The objectified capital sat in the house as the Steinway and the Gershwin scores from the Swift side, the banking pedigree from the Warburg side, and later the Albers thread and color she handled at the foundation. A child raised among those objects learns the feel of the game, what Bourdieu called the sens du jeu, the practical sense that lets a player move without consulting the rules. The field let her trade that inheritance for entry and never asked to see a transcript.
Symbolic capital has to be conferred, and the field confers it through a circuit of consecrating bodies, each with the authority to convert raw work into recognized value. Weber moved through the circuit as if she had drawn the map. The New Yorker took “Friend of the Family,” and a New Yorker acceptance is a consecration, a stamp that travels. Granta named her to its list of Best Young American Novelists, a list whose function is to anoint, to tell the field where to look. The New York Times Book Review marked three novels in a row as Notable Books. Yaddo seated her on its board. The Kenyon Review put her name on its masthead as a senior editor, and Kenyon College gave her the Thomas Chair. Each body took her output and returned it as standing.
Then she crossed to the other side of the counter. She judged the PEN/New England Awards and the Connecticut Book Awards. The consecrated became the consecrator. This is how a field reproduces its structure across time. It recruits the writers it has anointed to anoint the next ones, and the circuit closes, and the rules survive the players. A woman without a degree sat on the juries that decide which degreed and degreeless writers receive the field’s blessing. The outsider’s path, walked to its end, deposits her at the center of the apparatus that defines inside and outside.
Her years as a reviewer are the rawest form of field knowledge. Through the 1980s she reviewed fiction for Publishers Weekly and wrote a books column for Connecticut Magazine, and the work put hundreds of books across her desk to be weighed against a deadline. A reviewer learns the space of positions from the inside, where a book sits, what it claims, where the joints give way. Bourdieu would call this the accumulation of a practical mastery of the field, the kind no syllabus delivers.
Bourdieu used the term prise de position, position-taking, for the choices a producer makes that locate him in the field against his rivals. Weber’s choices point one direction. The fragmentation, the unreliable narrators, the documents and depositions and contested testimony, the refusal to resolve the mystery, all of it places her near what Bourdieu called the autonomous pole of the field, the restricted zone of small-circulation production aimed at peers and judges rather than at the mass market. The London Review of Books reader and the Kenyon Review subscriber are her audience, and the match between her position and theirs is what Bourdieu called homology, the alignment between the structure of producers and the structure of consumers. Difficult fiction finds the readers whose own capital lets them prize difficulty.
The Albers apprenticeship and the Kay Swift trust round out the picture as capital management across fields. At the foundation she handled the objectified capital of the Bauhaus, the conviction that thread and color and the square carry thought, and she carried the lesson from the loom to the page. As trustee of the Kay Swift Memorial Trust she took charge of her grandmother’s music, an estate of cultural capital that a careless heir might have let scatter, and she kept it in repair, restoring the score of Fine and Dandy. Bourdieu was interested in how capital converts and reproduces across generations and across fields, how a banking fortune becomes a Broadway score becomes a granddaughter’s literary standing.
Her fiction theorizes the same engine the theory describes. True Confections gives the floor to a woman narrating the history of a family chocolate company, and the novel takes apart the founding myth, the manufactured story a brand and a family sell about their own value. Triangle turns on the testimony of the last survivor of the 1911 fire, an account that has shifted over ninety years, and on a scholar who suspects the account conceals a transaction. Both novels stage the manufacture of value, the moment when a story becomes belief and belief becomes capital. Bourdieu had a word for the shared investment that keeps a field running, illusio, the collective faith that the game matters. A writer who lives by the manufacture of literary belief wrote her best books about the manufacture of belief. The producer and the product describe the same operation.
The field rewarded Weber for a freedom her inheritance underwrote. The no-degree story, told as work beating credential, rests on a habitus and a network and a body of objectified capital that the degree-seekers lacked. Bourdieu called this misrecognition, méconnaissance, the trick by which inherited advantage reads as pure gift, by which the labor and the luck of one’s origins disappear into the appearance of grace. Weber earned her standing, and she also started the race a generation ahead, with the Steinway in the house and the right name in the middle of her own. The field loves the autodidact because the autodidact confirms that talent owes nothing to circumstance. The truth runs the other way. Her position was won, and it was also assigned.
Katharine Weber and the Unexaminable Craft
If a settled standard sat behind The New Yorker, a shared thing the editors held in common, the verdict on a fixed set of words would not flip. It flipped. The judgment did not live in a standard. It lived in two people, and they did not agree.
Stephen Turner (b. 1951) has spent his career worrying that scene, or its like, across every field that claims to run on shared know-how. His book The Social Theory of Practices took aim at a comfortable habit of social thought, the habit of explaining why a group behaves alike by positing a hidden thing the members all carry, a shared practice, a common tacit knowledge, a background everyone absorbed. Turner granted the starting point. Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) had shown that real competence is tacit, that we know more than we can tell, that the skilled hand and the trained eye perform discriminations no rulebook captures. Turner kept the individual half and attacked the collective half. If knowledge cannot be put into words, he asked, then how does it pass from one head to another such that both heads end up holding the same thing? It cannot be poured across. What looks like transmission is each learner building a private capacity of his own from the public performances he watches and the corrections he takes. The capacities resemble each other enough to coordinate. That resemblance is an inference, not a proof of sameness, and certainly not proof of a shared object underneath. Katharine Weber’s career is a long argument for Turner, and against the people who would tidy her up.
Start with her self-account, because she built her public story on a claim about knowledge. She holds no high school diploma and no college degree. She says the work decides the writer and the credential decides nothing. Read through Turner, the claim is that literary competence is tacit. A certificate tests what can be set down and scored, and the thing that makes a sentence land cannot be set down and scored. So the certificate measures the wrong object, or rather it measures an object standing in for the one that counts, and Weber declined to perform the substitution. Few would dispute this much. Polanyi gives you that far. Turner takes you further, to the part that costs something, and the cost arrives later.
The Albers apprenticeship is the case her admirers call pure transmission. At the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation she worked beside Anni Albers, who had woven at the Bauhaus and taught at Black Mountain College, and who held that thread is a form of thought, that the event of a thread carries meaning before a single word attaches to it. Albers taught by doing and by setting the student to do, not by lecture, because the knowledge had no lecture in it. The tempting story says Albers handed her tacit craft to Weber at the loom, that a hidden competence moved from the master’s hands into the apprentice’s. Turner says look again. Nothing moved. Albers could not have articulated what her hands knew, so she could not have handed it over, and Weber could not have received a thing her teacher could not name. What happened is the only thing that ever happens. Weber watched, tried, failed, was corrected, and grew her own capacity, a private one, resembling Albers’s well enough to work. The loom did not teach a doctrine. It set up the feedback under which a second person built a second competence that nobody could read off the first. We call this transmission because we lack a better word and because the result coordinates. The honest description is two people, two sets of trained hands, and a resemblance no one can audit.
The New School ran on the same bet and the same blind spot. In 1972 Weber entered the first class of its Freshman Year Program, built for students who wanted books over credentials. The program guessed that what makes a reader cannot be certified, and so it dropped the certificate. Turner would credit the honesty and press the question the program could not answer. If the competence is tacit and each student reconstructs it alone, how does even a credential-free school know it has produced the thing? It cannot examine the tacit. It can only watch performances and infer that something took. The degree-granting university and the credential-free seminar stand at the same wall. The seminar admits the wall is there. The university paints a door on it and issues passes.
Her years as a reviewer are individual tacit knowledge. Through the 1980s she judged hundreds of novels against deadlines, for Publishers Weekly and for a column at Connecticut Magazine, and she learned where a book gives way. Ask her to reduce that to criteria and she could offer some, and the offered criteria would not be the knowing. The knowing is the trained discrimination that fires before the criteria catch up, the connoisseur’s eye Polanyi described, performed and not stated. Turner accepts all of this at the level of the person. His warning sounds the moment anyone climbs from her trained eye to a shared literary standard her verdicts express. There is no such standard sitting in the field, waiting to be channeled. There are many separately trained eyes whose verdicts converge often enough to keep the appearance of a common measure alive. When they diverge, the appearance drops, and you are back at the envelope, the same pages, two readers, no agreement.
Her fiction stages the same epistemology. Triangle turns on the last survivor of the 1911 fire, whose account of her escape has shifted across ninety years, and on a scholar who suspects the shifting account conceals a transaction. There is no master copy of that afternoon held in common, no shared memory the survivor merely reports. Each rememberer holds a private reconstruction, and what really happened is an inference drawn across divergent performances, never a record pulled from a collective vault. Weber refuses to resolve the divergence, and the refusal is the same refusal Turner makes against the social theorists. Do not posit the hidden shared thing to settle what only individuals hold. Sit inside the divergence. It is all there is.
Turner wrote a second book on the politics of expertise, on the trouble a tacit competence makes for a public that cannot check it. The expert performs a judgment the layman cannot follow and cannot test, and the judgment stands on the expert’s say-so. Weber sat on the juries of the PEN/New England Awards and the Connecticut Book Awards, and edited fiction at the Kenyon Review. There she exercised the trained eye as a gate. A jury cannot show its work, because the work is tacit. It performs discriminations and issues verdicts, and no outsider can audit the verdict against the standard, because the standard, as we have seen, is not a shared object anyone can produce on demand. Here is the part that costs her the comfortable version of herself. The same unexaminability that let the autodidact in is what lets the juror’s taste stand without accounting. The wall that freed her from the diploma is the wall behind which her own verdicts later sit, unchecked. She benefits at both ends. The credential could not capture her gift, which is true, and her gift, raised to a seat on the panel, cannot be captured either, which means the field’s authority over what counts as good rests on judgments that cannot be shown, cannot be tested, and do not have to agree. Weber is proof the certificate measures the wrong thing. She is also proof there is no right thing the public can inspect in its place. The knowledge that could not be examined to keep her out cannot be examined to hold her to account. That is the corner of the conversation nobody likes to stand in, and it is where she stands.
Novelist Katharine Weber – Triangle
From 2006. LF: I've heard you described as a "formalist." How do you feel about that?
Katharine: I'm getting used to the idea. I was surprised when Madison Bell called me a formalist when he was teaching my first novel and I visited his class last Spring, when I was Kratz Writer in Residence at Goucher College. But on reflection it does kind of fit. Okay, I'm a formalist. I do in fact care deeply about structure and form, and it is the way I conceive of my novels and write them. I feel a bit like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain who, when informed that one can only express oneself in poetry or prose, replies, "By my faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing anything about it, and I am much obliged to you for having taught me that."
LF: The character George Botkin almost took over your Triangle book?
KW: Oh, I don't think so.
LF: Do you struggle to keep your characters in their place?
KW: Not really. I don't understand writers who speak as if their characters were little figures perched on their laptops, hopping on the keys while they sit there helplessly. But then, as a formalist, I would say that, wouldn't I? Seriously, I do feel that my fiction emerges from a character in a situation. How I write it is the narrative strategy, but who that character is, why he is there, what he wants, what he does to get what he wants — that's where the fiction begins for me. But my characters serve the stories. I have never felt that they have taken over the stories.
LF: Does the distinction between literary and commercial fiction mean something to you?
KW: Yes.
LF: What?
KW: I think of literary fiction as being character-driven, and I also think of literary fiction as being concerned with the language, with the words on the page. I think of commercial fiction as being about story story story, with quality of language or narrative structure being of little consequence to the writing and of little interest to the reader.
LF: What part of writing is most interesting to you?
KW: I have never thought of writing in parts. I am not sure if you mean process (first drafts, outlines, writing the last pages the first time) or elements of a finished novel (character development, suspense, structure, imagery) or even the business side of it (writing a proposal, submitting a manuscript, getting a contract). ALL OF IT interests me. Which is to say, none of this fails to interest me.
LF: Do you love or hate the process of writing?
KW: Oh, both. Sometimes you write because the only thing — the only, only thing — even worse than writing is NOT writing. It's like chipping away in a mine with a bent teaspoon. But that's what you do.
LF: How has your occupation of writing affected you?
KW: I am sure that my daughters could answer this for you very thoroughly, re their childhoods, since I would be that mother who never made costumes for the school play and rarely volunteered for field trips, and so on. When you write you don't have a 9 to 5 job, you are always writing mentally even if not physically. Having a writer for a monther is having a mother who is not always present, even when she is present.
In other senses, being a writer has affected me in every moment of my waking life. Being that person on whom nothing is lost, taking James's famous advice to the young writer, comes naturally to me in the sense that I can be on a tedious line at Motor Vehicles and overhear something entirely worthwhile. Every random experience is potentially intriguing.
LF: What's the story of you and God?
KW: Not much of a story here. I suppose I would cautiously put up my hand for the agnostic group.
LF: What role has Judaism played in your life? Where does "Jewish" fall in your identity? The primary way you classify yourself or an incidental way?
KW: I come from a mixed background. My mother was a Warburg (my maternal grandfather was James P. Warburg) on one side and the daughter of an Episcopalian of British heritage on the other side (my maternal grandmother was the songwriter Kay Swift). My mother grew up with no awareness of her own Jewish identity whatsoever, despite being a Warburg in New York City, where we call the Jewish Museum The Jew Mu because we feel entitled to do so, since it was Uncle Felix's house.
My father was born in the back of a grocery store in Brooklyn in 1910, and was raised in an Orthodox household. So by some measures I am three-quarters Jewish, and I do feel like a Jew, most of the time, I have to say, except when JEWS TELL ME I AM NOT A JEW. Because of the matrilineal requirement. So here I am, with my Jewish relatives telling me I am Protestant, and my Protestant relatives telling me I am Jewish. This is where a novelist comes from, for sure. None of my Jewish identity is about belief so much as cultural heritage and identity. I certainly take this up in a major way in Triangle, which has now identifed me as a Jewish writer. You, for example, would probably not have come looking for me after reading The Music Lesson, my second novel, which features an Irish American Catholic woman embroiled with an IRA splinter group.
I am married to a Jewish man. One of our daughters identifies herself as Jewish and the other doesn't, though we certainly identified ourselves as Jews in their childhoods. We didn't belong to a temple, but we had an annual tradition of attending services at Yale Hillel, and we would usually storm out in the middle when the rabbi would make a statement about how being a Jew is remembering who your enemies are, and then we would drive home and discuss our outrage — so that is pretty the heritage of our family and how we honored the high holy days.
LF: Do all of your books have equal meaning to you or is one special and why?
KW: They each have certain meaning for me. I can't really pick one out and say this is the best, or this one is different. It really is like having four very different children. My four published novels are each very different, one from the other, which is the only way I know how to work. I cannot imagine tilling the same row finer and finer the way some writers do.
LF: How do you know when you've done good work?
KW: I feel it. I know it. I am a very critical reader. Most of what I read disappoints me, even though I am a very optimistic and generous reader. When I have written something that really succeeds — and I know how grandiose this sounds, but what the hell, I'll say it — it moves me.
LF: What have you sacrificed to be a writer?
KW: A certain amount of socializing, a loss of time spent on other pursuits, from tennis to gardening to travel to developing other sorts of skills….but ultimately, the greatest sacrifice of all, the thing you have to give up if you want to write? That would be not writing. You have to give up the not writing to get to the writing. It's hard to do, and for some people, tragically, it is impossible to do. I got a late start (my first novel was published the same year I turned 40) but I figured it out before it was too late.
LF: What do you do best and worst as a writer?
KW: What I do best as a writer? Oh, find the best reviews and unpolitic blurbs and see what the critics say. What do I do worst? I feel very unproductive and undisciplined. I think I do worst at just engaging with it, getting it done as thoroughly as I know in my heart I should be doing it. .
LF: Were there any events in childhood that prefigured your adult work?
KW: My entire childhood was in effect several lifetimes worth of material for my sensibility as a novelist.
LF: When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
KW: An adult. Seriously. I couldn't wait. Now that I have been an adult all these years, I think I have a much clearer sense of the playful little child inside me who in fact helps me do my best work.
LF: Could you have a protagonist you hated?
KW: To a degree, yes, but not entirely. I have certainly featured characters who are not very sympathetic, from Victor the toeless, adulterous Auschwitz survivor in my first novel to the possessed, relentless feminist scholar Ruth Zion in Triangle. But they do have some redeeming features, in the end, and they are not the main characters.
LF: Do you ever have trouble entering and leaving your vivid fantasy world?
KW: Yes, in the sense that it is hard to return to quotidien needs and dinner time and going to the dentist and being with family members at certain moments in the flow of writing. This is why going off to write alone for two or three weeks at certain key moments in the writing of my novels has always been a really productive and sane thing to do.
LF: How has marriage/motherhood affected your writing?
KW: I am married to a writer, which is mostly a good thing for the writing, but sometimes we are both in the same place with our work and it's hard. I think being in the swim of life, being so deeply connected to other human beings in all these profound ways has given me far more insight into how people are than I could have ever imagined it on my own as a solitary disconnected writer in a garrett.
LF: What do you most want from your kids aside from their happiness?
KW: I want them to be people who give more to the world than they take from the world.
LF: You seem so serious in all of your pictures.
KW: I don't think I am so serious, really. I think you would find some sunnier, earlier author photos if you Google images, and on my website — for Triangle it just seemed wrong to be too lighthearted-looking, you know?
LF: Who is your husband?
KW: My husband is Nicholas Fox Weber. He is the author of the controversial biography of the painter Balthus (whose biggest secret was his Jewish background, by the way), Patron Saints, and many other books, mostly about the visual arts. His new book (out next year) is about Le Corbusier. And he runs the Albers Foundation.
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