The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  The couple left their wedding reception quickly, catching a train to Washington, D.C., where they would spend a few days, and then, deviating from Sam’s itinerary, taking a train to Hot Springs, Virginia, where an April snowstorm kept them inside. They ended up at a resort in Southern Pines, North Carolina.22 Writing of her wedding night, Blanche would recall, “Both of us were virgins and very badly mated in the first place. My mother had told me nothing about life and sex, so on my own I [had gone] around to an old family doctor and asked him what happened and he told me. My sister-in-law gave me a ring [more commonly called a pessary, a contraceptive diaphragm] and put it in my suitcase when we left without telling me what to do with it, and I had no idea what to do with the damn ring. So for weeks we were very unsuccessful and very unhappy.”23

  Initially, Blanche assumed they’d work out their “beginners’ problems,” given time and patience. She was more upset about still finding herself under others’ control. Her mother expected her daughter’s trappings to convey a certain Edwardian aura, while her husband sought the life of an English squire: “The gentleman [Alfred] wanted very much to live in the country and I wanted to have Russian wolfhounds and books and didn’t care where they were, so we were on the verge of renting a house in White Plains for seventy dollars a month [the equivalent of about $1,600 in 2015]. Unwisely I took my mother up [to see it] before signing the lease. She had hysterics at the thought of her daughter living in such a hole.” Brooking no protest, Blanche’s parents rented for the newlyweds a house in Hartsdale, an attractive, modest hamlet next to Scarsdale in Westchester County, less than thirty miles from Manhattan, and furnished it in “satins and velvets and what not.”24

  But it wasn’t finished when the bride and groom returned from their honeymoon, so the newlyweds lived in a Manhattan hotel and went to work—there and at the Candler Building. In May, when their home was ready, they moved into the incongruously opulent place where they would live for two and a half years. Embodying her mother’s taste, instead of Blanche’s preference for an up-to-date, streamlined look, it was outfitted with a boudoir, guest room, study, living room, and dining room, “bedrooms, bathrooms, [and] maid’s room.” One “little Finnish maid” took care of it all.25

  The Hartsdale house, oddly named “Sans Souci” (“carefree”), was small for entertaining, but Blanche gave elaborate Saturday parties “up there,” as she called life in the suburbs, once a month. Perhaps because in later years she ate so little, she would recall the meals prepared by the maid as sumptuous, though guests thought them mundane. And when Sam and Lillian Knopf came for dinner, Blanche was inevitably told “where to get off: nothing was right for them ever. They would go into the pantry and into the kitchen and say the chicken was being cooked wrong, this is not right, why don’t you have butter before, or after, or whatever.” Compared with the relatively laissez-faire parents who had reared Blanche, the Knopfs “made for a very strange [visit].” At times it seemed Sam had no manners, honking loudly as he spewed his tobacco into a spittoon, even in front of guests. Nonetheless, she frequently asked her in-laws to spend the night.26

  Blanche and Alfred often hosted weekends at their home for Knopf’s burgeoning list of writers as well. A month into their marriage, through Mencken’s contacts, the couple met at least a few of Greenwich Village’s cosmopolitan circle of artists. Encouraged by their recently signed poet and Harvard graduate Witter Bynner, they would soon add to their list the leftist writer Floyd Dell, whose 1916 satire King Arthur’s Socks had been the first production of the transplanted Provincetown Players, in their new home in the heart of the Village.27

  More important to Knopf’s future, Bynner also helped the Knopfs sign the Village’s Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran, a purely commercial gamble that cost them little. In reality, much of their business was a risk, and Blanche knew they couldn’t wait too long to hit the mark. The ever-practical Alfred Harcourt was right: to thrive, publishers had to release a highly successful book within their first year. Noisily heralding themselves as willing to tackle all sorts of books as long as they were good, the novices had aspirations. Other publishers gossiped, and if many wished the new kids on the block success, others were unsettled by their mild air of superiority. The young Knopfs were ready to compete.

  * * *

  Early in 1916, even before they wed, Blanche and Alfred had repackaged W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest, first published in England in 1904.28 When Alfred had visited John Galsworthy during his graduation trip to Europe in 1912, the writer gave him an old copy of Green Mansions, which Blanche later read. Excited to discover that the book was in the public domain, the publishers issued a new edition with a foreword contributed by Galsworthy. Timing proved crucial to the revived success of Green Mansions: the novel, an ill-fated romance, was ideally positioned for American publication during World War I. Its European hero seeks refuge from battle in Venezuela’s virgin forests, where he stumbles upon the last of an aboriginal race, a clawed bird-girl, whose ethereal presence enthralls him. The couple fall in love, but their radical differences preordain them for sorrow. Blanche would remember the story fondly until she died, even possessing during the last half of her life nails (from illness and malnutrition) like the talons of the book’s dying heroine and, like her, often restricting her diet to lettuce leaf lunches. The Knopfs’ surprise hit created a vogue for Hudson’s other novels, enabling the publishers to share their windfall with the elderly writer, who was as shocked by the Knopfs’ generosity as by the sales.29 Green Mansions would go through nine printings by 1919. Their first book to sell twenty thousand copies, its sales ensured the company’s survival, for a while at least.

  Not all their decisions that year were farsighted: they’d been offered the chance to publish George Moore’s The Brook Kerith, which had been brought to them by Hergesheimer. At the time, the Knopfs felt that Moore’s work—based on the premise that Jesus didn’t die but had survived by taking natural medicines, then traveled to India in pursuit of enlightenment—“shouldn’t be published by a Jew.” Their authors didn’t want to see the new publishers harassed by the period’s zealous censors. The Knopfs would regret their caution, since John Sumner, heir to the oppressive Anthony Comstock as head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, allowed the book to pass.30

  The Anglo-English novelist Elizabeth Bowen would write of her American publishers that there was “an effrontery in their early lists,” which were soon notorious for their variety.31 The 1916 list, for example, advertised a book called Eat Well and Be Well next to thick Russian literary works by the Marxist writer Maxim Gorky and the nineteenth-century poet Mikhail Lermontov. Music and Bad Manners would prove central to Knopf’s future because of its author, Carl Van Vechten. Today considered a minor novelist but a gifted portrait photographer, Van Vechten had strong instincts about others’ writing that would serve the Knopfs well. He encouraged Blanche to include James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man amid a cache of otherwise second-rate novels the couple had collected for their short-lived “Blue Jade Library.” Later, Van Vechten would direct additional significant African-American writers to Blanche, including Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.

  In 1916, Van Vechten was behind Blanche’s insistent wooing of Dorothy Richardson, by several overly enthusiastic accounts the first stream-of-consciousness novelist in England. His efforts resulted in Knopf’s publishing an early section of Richardson’s fictional autobiography, Pilgrimage, which eventually ran to thirteen volumes. In its day, Pilgrimage was significant enough to be discussed by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield—though Richardson would quickly vanish from the public eye.

  In light of such early success, Blanche felt that she and Alfred were building a book company second to none. Happily entrenched in her work, she realized that the older firms weren’t interested in signing original works by unknown authors, or in translating European books into English—both of which wo
uld become Blanche’s specialties. When the newly popular poet Vachel Lindsay wrote the year before, “I wish you Godspeed in your publishing enterprise,” the couple had taken his attention as a sign that they would make it, especially when they saw Lindsay’s P.S.: he’d like to dine with them.32

  Even as their business expanded, publishing was still virtually closed to Jews. Houghton Mifflin, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and Doubleday, all with solid WASP credentials, held the advantage. But between the two world wars, Viking, Simon & Schuster, Random House, the Literary Guild, and the Book-of-the-Month Club, together with the Knopfs, would remake the literary landscape.33

  Blanche and Alfred often found themselves in competition with a nice but “dreary” man, Ben Huebsch, or with his opposite, Horace Liveright, whose firm, Boni & Liveright, opened in February 1917 (Boni would drop out a year and a half later). Both Knopfs bristled at being associated with Liveright, whom they considered a playboy. But Alfred and Blanche heeded the publisher’s lessons on selling books. Liveright sent circulars advertising his authors to three hundred major bookstores every week, and he gave away books along with articles about them and their authors to newspaper editors, in addition to using celebrity endorsements.

  Some of Alfred’s disdain for Liveright must have derived from envy: with Albert Boni, Liveright in 1917 had founded the Modern Library, which became the industry standard for printing inexpensive editions of classic works. While Liveright didn’t interest Blanche, his pal Carl Van Vechten did. Carl was an anomoly, with a shock of prematurely silver hair, knowing blue eyes, a usually closed mouth (to hide his buckteeth), and thin bangles encircling one delicate wrist; the husband of the beautiful, respected stage actress Fania Marinoff was rumored to like men at least as much as women.

  Van Vechten had been one of New York’s “recognized eccentrics” even before World War I. A Ph.D. in humanities from the University of Chicago had ensured him a wide range of subjects to write about. Even the erudite Mencken sought his opinion on the writers he and George Jean Nathan found for their magazine, The Smart Set. As suggested by his almost instantaneous friendship with Gertrude Stein (whose unfinished work he edited after her death, as well as becoming her literary executor), Van Vechten could talk knowledgeably about anything to anyone. It was from Van Vechten that Blanche heard about the “extraordinary” Paris debut of Le Sacre du Printemps that provoked the French audience’s hissing; the Salon des Indépendants show in Paris where Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) was refused; and the Armory Show in New York City a year later, where the painting was boldly displayed.34 From his multitude of lovers to his apartment decorated in “all the colors of the rainbow” to the raunchy diary he kept of his friends’ misbehavior, the charming, sometimes overbearing Van Vechten seemed to fit in everywhere—his guidance compensating, often, for the formal education Blanche lacked.

  From the start of their friendship, Carl’s brilliance nourished Blanche’s creativity, his whimsical book on cats motivating her to find a singular logo for Knopf. An animal implied motion, she decided, even more than the windmill used by London’s William Heinemann. After Blanche suggested that they use one of their borzois, or Russian wolfhounds, on the spine and title page of their books, the elegant dog that looked perpetually on the move quickly became the Knopf colophon, perfect for a house resounding with Russian literature. The couple would eventually hang a three-foot-long wooden borzoi on Knopf’s reception room wall.

  As Blanche had hoped, connections begat connections, and with fiction and poetry being her departments (Alfred preferred to stick with history and music), she was pleased when Van Vechten brought Wallace Stevens and Elinor Wylie to Knopf. Stevens would never relinquish his Hartford, Connecticut, insurance job, even after he had become one of the country’s most celebrated modern poets. The ethereal Elinor Wylie, who envisioned herself an avatar of Percy Bysshe Shelley, would soon publish in the prestigious Poetry magazine, and Knopf would release her first volume of poems a few years later. Now, in 1916, the first full year of publishing at the thinly staffed Alfred A. Knopf, twenty-nine books came out, twelve of them translated from the Russian. Such books helped open Americans to an exotic country, also evoked by their richly dyed book covers, frequently designed by Blanche and Alfred themselves. In addition to the Russian literature, there were nine American, six English, and two German books on the 1916 list. Carl Van Vechten and Henry Mencken, and occasionally Joseph Hergesheimer as well, served as informal scouts, the threesome knowing that the publishers’ list of books would make them look good, too: the Knopfs sought only the best of any genre they published. Still, it was Mencken whom Blanche would use as her go-to reader, asking him for a second opinion after she finished evaluating a manuscript, which he would give only after it had passed muster with the publisher: “Don’t try it out on me!” he once told her.35

  Knopf’s 1917 list would contain thirty-seven books, including such topical volumes as The Book of Camping and Meatless and Wheatless Menus (a nod to the war), alongside the novice poet T. S. Eliot’s first prose book, Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, published anonymously, with British rights sold to the London publisher John Lane. Knopf also published Van Vechten’s Interpreters and Interpretations.36 From the very beginning of their venture, the young publishers tended to choose books for what they considered their inherent value, rather than sales possibilities, assuming that in the long run quality would win out. The principle would not always prove providential: though it would earn the firm a formidable reputation, the Knopfs got used to their best talent often moving on to publishers with a larger purse. (Alfred would always lament passing on The Waste Land when he thought Eliot wanted too much money.)

  Knopf expanded rapidly, assuring Blanche that this was her calling. If only the churlish Sam Knopf would disappear. Her father-in-law seemed to enjoy undermining her, as if to prove she should be a homemaker rather than a career woman. Reassuring herself as well as Alfred, who was selling books in Boston, Blanche began 1917 by telegraphing him, “Monkey dear I’ve this moment said goodbye to you and I’ll be a good woof just be an old Reuben and have a good time your partner is at the office everything is going to be perfect.”37 Just like Alfred’s mother, who had heard enough stories about Sam Knopf’s dalliances with women to make her leery, her young husband’s adoration of his father demanded her attention—like father, like son, her mother had warned her.

  * * *

  On January 6, 1917, Blanche’s father, sixty-two-year-old Julius Wolf, who by now owned the second-largest children’s hat company in the country, died of a sudden heart attack.38 His daughter, though never close to her father, was surprised to feel a great sadness at losing him, and she stayed home from work for several days to care for her mother. Bertha, however, convinced her son, Irving, and his wife to come live with her and urged her daughter to resume her normal routine. Blanche had little choice: the young publisher had to deal with government censors who were ready to pounce on writers for the least infraction.

  In the country’s patriotic wartime climate, Mencken’s eighty-page A Book of Prefaces included the essay “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” in which the Knopf writer attacked iconic American writers of the nineteenth century, including Henry James and Mark Twain. He believed that they had fallen prey to a Puritan spirit “that encouraged them to wrap themselves in the cloth of righteousness.” The Knopfs were at the ready, they assured Mencken, if the government’s censors came after him. A suit was initiated, but Mencken wasn’t worried: he liked nothing better than fighting stupidity. Fortunately for everyone, the suit was dismissed.

  Turning to Joseph Hergesheimer, the Knopfs would now publish their first original American fiction, two years after they opened their doors for business. Hergesheimer’s moderately successful novel The Three Black Pennys, a generational chronicle of ironmasters who rise in society, wasn’t expected to bring in much income. Blanche was just relieved that she and Alfred no longer had to physically bind the individual bo
ok sheets sent back from the printers. Until now, even Sam Knopf had occasionally helped with the tedious process.

  Alfred’s cousins and their families often served as assistants in the office, where their bosses were demanding and their wages low. Working for the new publishing company already carried a modicum of cachet; still, the salaries, minimal even by industry standards, ensured a fast turnover. Whenever a young worker complained, he was immediately fired, despite being Alfred’s kin, the publisher disgusted that money was so important to people in such a noble profession.

  By the end of 1917, with her husband taking the sleeper train to Chicago at least quarterly and traveling the Northeast Corridor as well, Blanche was handling the Candler office by herself, except for the times Sam would stop by to advise her on how to do things. Between December 12 and December 17, she wired Alfred daily: “Dearest so sorry I couldn’t get letter off to you but this will have to do. Everything is splendid in town and here at Sans Souci are you being careful and successful. Do take the best care of Reuben because I love him and come back soon V.” If her notes had begun to sound syrupy, the tone was a veiled apology for tensions at the office, especially on occasions when Alfred blithely dismissed Blanche’s concerns about an author, while hardly registering her complaints about his father.

  According to Alfred’s childhood friend Elsie Alsberg, Blanche seemed uneasy. “At the beginning of the marriage, in the house in Westchester before Pat [the Knopfs’ son] was born, I sensed the marriage was not too good. [Blanche] was a little on the snippy side, not this nice sort of flow that exists between young people who care about each other.” Even when they entertained together at home, Blanche seemed uneasy.39

  Perhaps Alsberg failed to remember what had upset Blanche when they last dined together: her husband flirting with Elsie, to whom the young wife thought Alfred was seriously attracted. Soon Blanche had the meager solace of getting back at Elsie: Marjorie Henley, a “new girl” in the same Westchester community, had taken Elsie’s place.40 The recent bride was confused that her husband already seemed interested in other women, though he seemed uninterested in making love to her.