The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  * * *

  Doing her part to develop their publishing list, Blanche now invited at least a dozen guests to her home on weekend afternoons, “every kind of person,” though at the beginning she could offer only cheap wine and cucumber sandwiches.21 The Knopfs’ ledger shows that by the end of December the new mother had added regular weeknight dinners to her entertaining schedule as well, and these were even more elaborate than those served on the weekends. Blanche’s dinners would accelerate through the 1920s, when she found the best of Prohibition liquor to pair with the caviar she had begun to serve. Before long, with Sam’s help, the firm came up with a hundred thousand dollars, and Blanche was appointed vice president, Alfred president, and Sam treasurer.22 But though Blanche and Alfred had dreamed up Knopf together, she would never convince her husband that she belonged to his world. Speaking with Simon & Schuster’s editor in chief Jack Goodman, Alfred said, “Looking back to the days when I was on the board, the idea of a woman being part of it is something that I simply cannot become reconciled to.”23

  To the Knopfs’ relief, in 1919 Joseph Hergesheimer’s Java Head was off to a good start, unlike The Three Black Pennys two years before. Its subjects miscegenation and opium addiction, the novel was narrated from multiple perspectives and proved to be both a commercial and a critical success. Its success only made Hergesheimer more insufferable, as far as Blanche was concerned. She nonetheless threw the requisite book parties on his behalf. Hergesheimer, soon identified with stories of debauchery among the wealthy, would prove a major author for Knopf through the early thirties, with what critics now think of as melodramatic, overwrought prose. In its time, however, his writing was considered elegant, part of the aesthetic school in favor throughout the 1920s. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (in which George Babbitt reads a long passage from The Three Black Pennys) borrowed from the older author. And Hergesheimer’s themes of high-society decadence inspired novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In 1922, a poll of critics in Literary Digest voted Hergesheimer “the most important American writer today.”24

  The initial success of Java Head and the financial assistance it provided did much to buoy the Knopfs. Throwing stylish cocktail parties on those evenings when Alfred was home, or tending to fretful authors and their contracts while he was away, Blanche played to strengths her husband lacked. By now the Knopfs were accumulating an impressive stable of authors, both in English and in translation. Hugh Walpole, a wildly popular British novelist between the world wars, pronounced Knopf “a very intelligent publisher—the best in America there’s no doubt.”25 Encouraged to travel more to increase book orders, Alfred seemed, to Blanche’s delight, to appreciate any time when she could join him, or even meet him at the station upon his return.

  In September 1919, a police strike in Boston unnerved the couple, who were staying downtown at their favorite hotel, the old Parker House. Opened in 1855, and the first in Boston to feature running water and elevators, the hotel boasted famous guests. Charles Dickens gave his premier reading of A Christmas Carol on American soil there, and half a century later, John F. Kennedy proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier. Ho Chi Minh would work as a baker in its kitchen and Malcolm X as a busboy in the restaurant. On this visit, however, when the Knopfs called on Ellery Sedgwick, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, he looked terrified, sitting behind his desk with a revolver in his hand. The night before, lawless mobs had looted the neighborhood, its plate-glass windows crashing around him. Finding the excitement intoxicating, Blanche wanted to stay. But Sedgwick urged her and Alfred to leave town and meet again at a more hospitable time, so the couple returned to New York, posthaste.

  4

  A NEW WORLD OUTSIDE HER DOOR

  JUST AS SAM DID during his marriage to Ida, Alfred was leaving his wife alone with a young child for weeks at a time. But Blanche, unlike Ida, aspired to become an indispensable part of the family business.1 After realizing she could leave the office in capable hands after all, she accompanied Alfred increasingly over the next three years. She connected with ever-more-powerful book buyers at department stores, who were able to afford larger purchases than the smaller shops, and listened carefully to their concerns. She made arrangements for the couple to visit Rich’s in Atlanta, Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, and, of course, Marshall Field’s in Chicago, all of which had expanding book sections.

  Blanche’s tact often compensated for Alfred’s temper when he felt insulted. Once, when Wanamaker’s book buyer and general manager, Walter Cox, belittled the local Philadelphia author Joseph Hergesheimer to Alfred, the publisher stormed out of the store, leaving Blanche to smooth things over, a job she often assigned herself. The Knopfs realized what loyalty, sometimes requiring a delicate touch, meant in their business—and that it paid to reward repeat customers. A few years earlier, when one book buyer had ordered 250 copies of The Three Black Pennys, the couple, though short on cash, took him to lunch at the elegant Sherry’s restaurant on Fifth Avenue, its popular social gatherings to come to an end in the following years due to Prohibition.

  As the publishers’ well-orchestrated efforts took off, their success encouraged their competitors. George Oppenheimer, who had worked at Knopf for a few early years, founded Viking (with Harold K. Guinzburg) in 1925. Having learned the trade from Blanche and Alfred, Oppenheimer now annoyed them with his irritating chatter whenever he ran into them. In contrast, they welcomed the news that the reliable Ben Huebsch was joining Viking; maybe he would temper its founder’s silliness. Publishers of various persuasions were coming to market in those days, outpacing the older ones still recovering from the ravages of World War I. But however modern the publishing world looked, Blanche wasn’t a real part of it to most people’s thinking: she was, she repeated sardonically throughout her life, Alfred’s wife.

  Shrewdly, she fought back, making her gender work for her. Throughout 1919, she promoted her favorite French novels in the unexpurgated form now allowed in the United States. Over the next five years, the respected critic Burton Rascoe would write introductions to several of the Knopf reissues, among them Madame Bovary. In 1920 the house published Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (about the costs of upper-class—and illicit—love), and in 1922, Émile Zola’s Nana (the story of a once-poor courtesan, destroyed by her appetite for luxury). A Knopf shipping clerk remembered how he tried to stem “the crisis caused by women in the book bindery who were cutting out for their friends’ juicy pages from a nineteenth-century French novel describing a love scene with details rarely printed in those days.”2 In 1925, when she felt sure American readers were ready, Blanche commissioned a translation of Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, a semihistorical love triangle involving ambiguous sexual identities.

  While Blanche was getting the stories of her fictional lovers translated, she listened to tales of actual sexual misconduct that she found more shocking. Van Vechten told of running into George Gershwin (whom he’d met in 1919) at T. R. Smith’s apartment. Smith, an editor at Liveright and a friend of Mencken’s, owned an extravagant pornography collection. The four men were already frequenting Harlem, enjoying music and dance as white people rarely had, with Gershwin profoundly affected. He was witnessing the blues give birth to jazz, producing sounds he’d never heard before. Impossible to define, jazz delighted Blanche with its improvisation, its novel syncopation, its moments borrowed from African, European, and homegrown traditions. Not only the French knew how to misbehave, she would decide, and Harlem undoubtedly beat the Village hands down for creating a scene. When she stepped north of Ninety-Sixth Street, a place ready-made for anyone inclined to flout convention, she must have sensed she was going to become someone new.

  Indeed, by 1920, change was the constant of the age. Within a year or so of the boys returning home from the war, the scent of money permeating the air was but one suggestion that Prohibition would not cost Americans their liquor after all. The boozy city, egged on by officials banning liquor from the land, delighted
Blanche, who, like many others, looked forward to rebelling against (rather than complying with) the impractical new sanction ruling New York City along with the rest of the country. Referred to most often as the Volstead Act (the legislation had been handled by Andrew Volstead, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, though the Anti-Saloon League’s Wayne Wheeler had created the bill), the Eighteenth Amendment’s ratification was certified on January 16, 1919, and it took effect on January 17, 1920. As if to announce “out with the old, in with the new”—but in its own way, not through prohibitions—a skyscraper arose in place of the seemingly immortal Delmonico’s, where Blanche’s relatives had taken her twice. The restaurant had been celebrated as Manhattan’s finest for almost a century, its ballroom the site of countless society debuts.

  In part because of the accounts of Harlem that Carl Van Vechten shared with her, the formerly apolitical Blanche had become aware of the exclusion of “colored people” from the polls now open to white women. As worrisome, the Ku Klux Klan had teamed with local suffragettes to oppose drinking. Against such madness, Carlo (a name, along with “Carlos,” that Van Vechten often used) and Henry Mencken would prove Blanche’s stalwart companions and protective friends throughout the decade. It was on their arms that she entered the unmarked doors of Manhattan speakeasies (usually staffed with the finest chefs), and it was in their company that she sought even wilder clubs in Hoboken, New Jersey. “Meet you in Hoboken” had acquired new cachet, the phrase appearing in messages between friends who had introduced Blanche to the raciest social circles of the age.

  She was also close to Sinclair Lewis, who sought to be published by Knopf but whom Blanche reluctantly turned down: a daring writer, Lewis was notorious for the extravagant demands he placed on his publishers—always wanting more money, more publicity, more love (the money a sticking point with Alfred). When Blanche finally convinced her husband to buy an almost finished manuscript by Lewis for Knopf, she petitioned the author too late. Main Street, a novel that lacerates the hypocrisy of small-town life, was signed to Harcourt, Brace and Howe and published on October 23, 1920. It would be number one on Publishers Weekly’s annual bestseller list (compiled from bookstores) for 1921, within the first six months of its release selling 180,000 copies and within a few years reaching two million.3 Though there are no records of Blanche’s frustration, it is hard to believe that the Knopfs failed to “have words.”

  Lewis, who would remain a lifelong friend of the Knopfs, was just one of the new literary lights who had emerged from Greenwich Village (and then moved on). Willa Cather would move to, not from, the Village: born in Virginia, raised in Nebraska, and transported briefly to Pennsylvania, Cather would nonetheless identify in her fiction most strongly with the Great Plains. One day, having been interested in Knopf ever since they’d published Hudson’s Green Mansions four years earlier, she left her apartment at 5 Bank Street and took the subway to the Candler Building. Though the company history maintains that she showed up at the office unexpectedly, she had in fact called Blanche for an appointment.4 (In later years Cather would claim to have moved to Knopf from her longtime publisher, Houghton Mifflin, because of “how different” Knopf books looked from others.)5 She was impressed by the young company’s obvious support of its authors, conveying through their prominent, well-designed ads that writer and publisher shared goals. In contrast, Houghton Mifflin had barely eked out notices for her novels, including her latest, My Ántonia, published two years earlier, in 1918. Complaining to Houghton Mifflin about their weak advertising, Cather referred to Knopf’s promotion of Hergesheimer’s Java Head: even before the novel was officially released, Knopf had reprinted early positive reviews to build an audience. Now, surprised at the modesty of the Knopfs’ office—Blanche was working the switchboard at lunchtime—Cather was nonetheless pleased when the publishers offered her a chance to try them out: they would quickly publish a book of her short stories, even while she was still under contract to Houghton Mifflin for her novels.6 So it was that in September 1920 the Knopfs released Youth and the Bright Medusa, advertising it to the hilt.

  Of course, Cather knew that when a book sold well, the house was willing to spend more to advertise the next one. In 1915, Houghton Mifflin had allotted Henry Sydnor Harrison’s V.V.’s Eyes, read by the Knopfs during their courtship, more than six thousand dollars for publicity because of strong sales for the author’s first novel, Queed. The advertising funds assigned to Cather’s books had been puny by comparison (though not insignificant in those years): in 1915 The Song of the Lark received a budget of one thousand dollars, and in 1918 My Ántonia was given three hundred dollars, this last an insulting vote of no confidence. Its initial sale made only thirteen hundred dollars for Cather, and it earned her only four hundred in the second year. Though not insignificant to many writers, the figures were below Cather’s expectations.

  Looking at the numbers, Cather believed she couldn’t write the kind of book that would sustain Houghton Mifflin’s commercial appetite.7 The Knopfs, however, made her feel welcome. From the September 29, 1920, advertisement for Youth and the Bright Medusa in The New Republic (with Alfred’s exhortation to those in the know) to Blanche’s addressing the daily needs of the author—sending her her favorite foods and assurances of being available day or night—Cather knew her home was with Knopf. She proved it with the sixteen books she proceeded to publish with them.8

  “Life was simply no longer a battle,” Cather’s companion and biographer, Edith Lewis, noted. “She no longer had to feel apologetic or on the defensive.”9 Cather wanted her books published in August, for instance, to tap the summer vacation trade, and Knopf obliged. It wasn’t about finances: Cather was interested in the sales primarily for what they said about her worth as a writer. She had a private income, which caused Knopf to treat her with even more respect, directing their accountant, Joe Lesser, to do her income taxes yearly. In 1923, their faith in her would be vindicated when One of Ours, a story of a midwesterner’s journey to the front in World War I, won Knopf’s first Pulitzer Prize for “novels.” Meanwhile, Youth and the Bright Medusa kept selling as well, and her royalties topped nineteen thousand dollars on the two books that year alone.

  Alfred’s top-of-the-page, stentorian advertisement in The New Republic read:

  There are not many living writers from whom a new book commands the attention with which each successive volume of Miss Cather’s is now awaited. There seems to be no disputing the fact that she is our foremost living woman novelist. In the stories in the present volume she deals with youth’s adventures with the many-colored Medusa of art. Each tale is marked by the amazing ardor and restless energy of imagination which is peculiarly Miss Cather’s; by a quick, bold cutting into the tissues of human experience and emotion that makes each of them a new discovery about character and life.10

  Four years after winning the Pulitzer, Cather would publish Death Comes for the Archbishop, the story of two priests offering Christianity to the Hopi and Navajo Indians who’d recently become part of the United States territory of New Mexico. The novel would be included among Time’s one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and on the Modern Library’s list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century.

  The Cather connection boosted Blanche’s confidence to a new level. Alfred was impressed by her gift for discerning whom to publish, and she felt she had finally gained her husband’s respect. Such certainty allowed her to be more relaxed, even playful with Alfred. Now, when the two were at home together, he took to working nude at his desk, in obeisance to the summer heat—and he even allowed his wife to snap a picture of him without his clothes.

  Around this period, Blanche increased the number and size of the parties she gave. For the most part, the guests still came from Knopf’s roster of writers, though often the invitations were supplemented by Van Vechten. He encouraged Blanche to include interesting figures emerging onto the Harlem scene, such as Paul Robeson and A’Lelia W
alker, who had just inherited her mother’s fortune, making her the richest black woman in America.11 Blanche, impressed by strong women, was especially taken by A’Lelia’s story: her mother, Madam C. J. Walker, a former laundress who became a brilliant businesswoman, had built an empire on a secret hair formula. Selling it to black women to straighten their hair, Walker, upon her recent death, had ceded the “beauty empire, an Italianate villa overlooking the Harlem River, and several elegant townhouses” to her only child.12

  By October 1920, Blanche was able to take a break. As a result of their recent hire of the solid Joe Lesser as their bookkeeper/accountant, she could relax and enjoy the kind of genial family life she’d often envied. Together, she and Alfred took Pat to Atlantic City on several weekends; Alfred’s photographs show Blanche smiling broadly, delighted to watch Pat roll his hoop or dig near the water’s edge. Bundled against the autumn breeze, she sits in a sand chair, contentedly reading a manuscript while her husband and son throw a ball.