The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  * * *

  Still abroad in July, Blanche was relieved when raves appeared for the two-volume translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain she’d commissioned, using Helen T. Lowe-Porter again. (As usual with translations, one reviewer lauded Lowe-Porter’s rendition, while another faulted it.) Though a difficult novel with long philosophical digressions, the story of a temporary home for consumptives, set in the small Alpine valley of Davos, fascinated critics. Even when Edwin Muir of The Nation complained of its “wearisome passages,” he admitted they often proved “the most fascinating”—if one had the energy to read the sometimes interminable sentences. The Boston Evening Transcript called The Magic Mountain “one of the greatest and most moving books of our time.” The Times Literary Supplement claimed that “not one sentence of this vast corpus is insignificant or irrelevant,” with Mann possessing “the true epic form.” Indeed, Mann could have titled it An Anatomy of Melancholy, according to The Saturday Review of Literature, if Robert Burton’s book about the woes of the world hadn’t “preempted the title” in 1621.8

  Though she had immediately recognized the book’s power, Blanche confessed to Mencken that she found its style tedious. He agreed, acknowledging that no matter how gifted the translator Blanche hired, certain rhythms and repetitions, especially Mann’s, weren’t meant for English.

  When they returned home, Blanche drove out to Purchase to see the progress on the house, where she was particularly impressed by the grounds. Alfred’s friend Frank Bailey had advised him on landscaping and had donated a near forest to the property as well, counting on Knopf’s assistance in return, when Bailey needed advice on his business pamphlets. Frank dispatched three designers to plant trees and geometrically spaced shrubs on Alfred’s seven and a half acres. Though Blanche was fond of Frank, she knew his generosity was connected to Sam Knopf: Frank, a major real estate agent in the boroughs, had become friends with Sam when Alfred’s father tried but failed to emulate Frank’s business tactics in real estate.

  Unlike Jim Rosenberg, who had helped Alfred finance the property and whom Blanche disliked because of his conservative politics, Frank impressed her. An amateur horticulturist with his own arboretum in Locust Valley, on the North Shore of Long Island, he also had a magnificent residence in Essex House, on Central Park South. Its expanse, on a rare day, allowed a view from the Statue of Liberty to West Point. Blanche also enjoyed joking about the unusual pantry of medicine bottles she and Frank each maintained. Frank, who had bequeathed millions to his alma mater, Union College, would also be a great help if Pat, not much of a student, wasn’t admitted to Princeton, his first (and unlikely) choice. Anticipating the need for a quid pro quo, Alfred had offered to publish Bailey’s diatribe against current income tax laws.

  Soon Blanche was tending to two September 1927 publications, whose disparity, she commented, only proved Knopf’s flexibility. Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop was released to great critical praise. Blanche, enthusiastic about Cather’s novel from the first, appreciated that the seemingly old-fashioned author was experimenting with a new form for her book, the deft inclusion of historical figures within her fiction. Two years earlier, The Professor’s House had also shown Cather attempting, if not successfully, to move her fiction from its traditional mooring to something that mixed past and present. Her subsequent novel would reap the rewards of her earlier efforts. Death Comes for the Archbishop portrays two well-meaning priests, one French, one from the Midwest, sent to help the Vatican create parishes in the territory recently ceded to America. A cadre of priests has been living among and supposedly tending to the Native Americans, especially the Hopi and Navajo. But many of the religious figures fear, correctly, the end of the free reign they’ve been given to take advantage of the population instead of caring for the people.

  Cather based the tale on the life of a priest who founded a Santa Fe church—but she populated it with the fictional presence of Kit Carson, Stephen Foster, Saint Augustine, and James Fenimore Cooper, among others. “In the first place, this is not a novel. In the second place it is one of the most superb pieces of literary endeavor this reviewer has ever read regardless of language or nation,” one reviewer wrote. The Nation said that “it is a book to be read slowly, to be savored from paragraph to paragraph.” A less enthusiastic reader complained of the book’s “perplexed … intention.” The very ambiguity of genre applauded elsewhere was criticized here: “It is not really a novel; and since it seems left in a halfway condition, one wishes it were.”9 Cather was stretching herself and her readers, refusing to submit to strict genre requirements. And for some readers, Death Comes for the Archbishop was even a love story about two men, Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant.

  If Cather’s novel had been a commercial risk, the other big autumn book was a sure hit—at least in retrospect, Blanche said wryly. Logan Clendening’s The Human Body, a forthright exploration of physiology, was instantly popular. Throughout the twenties, studies of the brain and anatomy had filled the marketplace, though the majority were centered on psychoanalysis or women’s reproductive systems. The Human Body instead gave a straightforward overview of both male and female anatomy. Several years earlier, Mencken had read Clendening’s medical textbook and felt sure that the physician could distill his professional knowledge into a book for the layperson. With Mencken serving as Knopf’s ambassador, the doctor had quickly agreed.

  Blanche decided now to build on Knopf’s early, barely activated Borzoi Mystery Stories, to encompass dark, stylish detective fiction. She was impressed by manuscripts that had reached her of late, often through their beginnings with the magazine The Black Cat. Before she could discuss with Alfred her plan to rejuvenate the series, however, the couple was again at odds, and she put the project on hold. Alfred, complaining that the Publishers’ Lunch Club discriminated against Jews, prepared to sponsor his own “Book Table” in 1928—and proceeded to exclude Blanche or any other woman from joining. Humiliated and fuming at her omission, Blanche chain-smoked her Chesterfields, as she uncharacteristically snapped at a reporter that she had no desire to be inside with all those cigars anyway. Nor with the spittoons, which even Alfred kept in his office, copying his father. Joe Lesser tried to distract her with strong financial figures—sales of $1,213,000, putting the company’s profits at $61,595 (approximately $800,800 in 2015 currency)—but Blanche’s anger was unappeased.

  The timing was perfect when she received a letter from her friend the pianist Myra Hess, with her irresistible joie de vivre, about a possible trip to the States. To Mencken Blanche jested that maybe Myra could marry him when she arrived; he had been taken with her during her earlier visit. At the very least, Blanche expected to dine with him by herself before Myra arrived and captured his attention. It was time for her and Menck to get some more fabulous chicken paprikash, which she had enjoyed the last time the two had been out together. Blanche wanted to stem rumors that she wasn’t eating.

  Such gossip, however, wasn’t far from the truth. Continuing to keep her weight down to that of the young flappers, Blanche played with her food rather than downing it. By 1928, she was on her cleansing diet again, a part of her regimen for several more years. Often she ate only a few celery stalks and olives in a day, and the occasional piece of fish. When Myra Hess confirmed that she was indeed coming, Blanche decided to fast for the next week, then eat normally with Hess. The publisher loved looking like one of the gaunt Parisian women who frequented the Café de Paris or Café de Flore.

  By the 1930s, if she didn’t count every calorie, Blanche sensed the ghost of her overweight parents and the memory of herself as a zaftig high school girl always on a diet. Within a few years she would visit Mencken’s doctor, Benjamin Baker, at Johns Hopkins, whom she told, “Keep me in good health and keep me from getting fat.” Decades after Blanche’s death, the ninety-year-old physician would remember using words like “crazy” and “ridiculous” in response to her requests, including reducing her weight to seventy-five
pounds, which would have caused her “to throw her arms around” him if he’d succeeded.10 Mencken suspected that her newest diet aid (probably an amphetamine) was agitating her, and that such concern about her weight was exacerbated by living in the metropolis.

  Half teasing, he suggested to Blanche that Knopf move to Baltimore, a much more reasonable place than New York, where commerce was becoming impossible and where “in five or ten years not a publisher will be left.”11 In contrast to New York, he joked, “there is plenty of music in Baltimore, but not too much. The beer is good. A sound house, with plenty of room, costs less than half as much as a New York flat. There are no subways or elevated lines. The taxis are clean and cheap. New York is only four hours away. I throw out the idea!”12 But Baltimore was a southern city, and Henry knew that Blanche would never leave Manhattan. She thrived on modernity, and the energy of Manhattan revitalized her. Others might have bemoaned the innovative builders whose visions of the new included demolishing the “old”—including Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Fifth Avenue mansion—but Blanche couldn’t wait to see what rose in its stead.

  9

  A WELL OF LONELINESS

  IN THE MIDST OF PREPARING THE FALL 1928 LIST, Blanche received from Scott Fitzgerald a “full conjugation” of the verb “to cocktail.”1 Scott had heard from Mencken that she was downing a few too many Manhattans meant to pass for lunch, and cleverly passed on the concern—of both men. On February 10, when Blanche was suddenly seized by a stabbing abdominal pain, she figured the alcohol had caught up with her. Sidney Jacobs, Knopf’s recently hired production manager, urged her to eat something to stave off what he felt sure was hunger, but the knife-like sensations only grew worse. Finally, she took a cab to Lenox Hill Hospital, where doctors performed an emergency appendectomy and found a large tumor that, fortunately, turned out to be benign.

  Her spirits were briefly revived by a letter brought from the office that had been plucked from the slush pile. Blanche was struck by the name Dashiell Hammett, having heard of him before, though she couldn’t recollect where. Soon she remembered: Hammett, an ex–Pinkerton detective, had published short stories in Mencken’s The Smart Set, coedited with George Jean Nathan for a few years, and, more recently, in The Black Mask, the pulp fiction magazine Mencken and Nathan had begun in 1920 (and sold two years later). Boldly accompanied by a manuscript, Hammett’s letter to Blanche explained that he wanted to prepare two novels for Knopf’s release. The timing was perfect, given Blanche’s plan to revive the Borzoi Mystery Stories. Reading the submissions while she was propped up in her hospital bed, she was quickly convinced of the treasure she had just been delivered. With Hammett’s confidence further motivating her, Blanche revitalized Knopf’s mystery fiction line, creating the “tough-guy crime novel.” As the two-time Edgar Award winner Andrew Klavan writes, novelists including “Hammett, James Cain, and Raymond Chandler [all Blanche’s finds] … made one of our nation’s most significant contributions to world literature, an enduring genre as American as jazz.”2

  Her excitement was short-circuited, however, by a bout of depression when she returned from the hospital after her abdominal surgery. Perhaps, as friends suspected, her erratic eating habits had worn her down. But Carl Van Vechten, while visiting her at Lenox Hill, had discovered the probable reason for her intense sadness, though he was pledged to keep it a secret. The pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch, with whom Blanche was having a passionate affair, had called on her at Lenox Hill to say he was leaving on a yearlong concert tour. Blanche cried for an entire day, Van Vechten remembered. It was only after she phoned him several times, going on at great length about the pianist’s upcoming trip, that he had realized Benno was Blanche’s lover.3

  Deliberately provocative, Blanche would eventually name two dogs after Moiseiwitsch and Jascha Heifetz—supposedly for the animals’ attempts to “harmonize” with the men’s recordings. Although Blanche’s handsome musicians were physically ardent and enthusiastic lovers, they were emotionally cold. Like the future CIA head Allen Dulles, who once demanded that he and his lover, Mary Bancroft (a friend of Blanche’s through her Washington connections), make love hastily on a sofa to “‘clear his head’ before an important meeting,” so Blanche’s musicians expended their primary passion on their music, using what was left over on women other than their wives.4

  Now Benno, during a hiatus between marriages that had allowed him to pay especial attention to Blanche, would be gone.5 When Alfred visited her in the hospital, Blanche had rallied, modeling her floppy flower hair bow for the photograph her husband took.6 Dressed in a pale robe, she held to her chest two white stuffed animals, a unicorn and a cat, given to her by Moiseiwitsch.

  Blanche rarely admitted discomfort, physical or emotional, no matter how bad she felt. At the same time, she was a soft touch for any sign that someone—especially Alfred—cared about her. He was so seldom affectionate that it took but the smallest gesture for Blanche to stop her sniping. Showing off her gifts to her husband was meant to suggest to him how much she enjoyed receiving presents, and how others—specifically lovers—liked giving them to her. For all her marital disappointments, Blanche still wanted Alfred’s heart.

  In May 1928, the publisher’s depression culminated in a “nervous breakdown,” resulting in a hospital stay at Dr. Dengler’s Sanatorium in Baden-Baden. She shared her “situation” with the Mann translator Helen Lowe-Porter, with whom Blanche had become friends. Lowe-Porter wrote her, “You had been doing too much and had too much on your mind. Don’t wear yourself out.”7 But there seemed no other way: Knopf depended on her. While Alfred was able to ignore the business when he needed to relax, Blanche seemed afraid to appear anything but indispensable. The entire time she was at the sanatorium, “despite her exhaustion … she continued co-managing all aspects of the London office.”8

  She had chosen Dengler’s through a recommendation from her acquaintance the leftist writer Louise Bryant, who had retreated to the sanatorium after her (second) husband, John Reed, died in 1920. Bryant had returned now when her third marriage was in peril, and she had attempted suicide. Van Vechten photographed the two women at an earlier dinner party, their facial expressions suggesting the intensity of their conversation. Louise had surely repeated to Blanche much of what she told the editor of The Liberator (the major American Marxist newspaper) about Reed’s death: that he suffered a great deal of pain and fought bravely for his life. Reed’s story affected Blanche deeply, and when the writer said she was returning to Baden-Baden that summer, Blanche decided to go as well. The two had discussed the illness Louise was now suffering: Dercum’s disease, which came with “painful, subcutaneous tumors” and sudden, inexplicable weight gain. Formerly a shapely woman, she was now showing signs of what she told Blanche was elephantiasis, though she wore elaborate lace mantillas to hide her swollen arms. Given that Blanche had been constantly fighting extra pounds ever since Pat’s birth, Louise’s previously unexplained obesity must have filled her with dread.

  Even at the sanatorium, Blanche dressed stylishly. One photograph shows her wearing her beautifully printed silk robe designed by Erté, the Russian-born Art Deco designer. In 1928, Erté created costumes for endless revues, from the Folies-Bergère in Paris to George White’s Scandals in New York, for which George Gershwin’s early work was used in the 1920–24 editions. Blanche had managed to take a bit of her Manhattan sensibility even to the quiet mountain retreat.

  The two women inevitably discussed a provocative book for which Blanche was negotiating American rights. The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s novel about lesbian love, was of particular interest to Louise, who would be divorced in two years due to gossip about her own sexual affinity for women. Louise had heard of The Well of Loneliness, to be released in July, three months before Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, whose protagonist undergoes a sex change. When Knopf’s English office had told Blanche in April of the forthcoming Radclyffe Hall publication, she immediately wrote Sir Newman Flower, the Knopfs’ o
ld associate (whose wife had shrugged off Blanche’s suicide attempt seven years earlier), now serving as Hall’s English agent. Flower let her know that their mutual friend Carl Brandt was representing U.S. rights. Blanche had moved fast after reading the manuscript, and by April 16, when she received typed and bound copies, she had already made a date to meet with Hall to finalize a contract. Blanche would publish the book soon after the U.K. edition appeared, she proudly told Louise Bryant.9 Publisher and author both knew that the novel would create controversy, and they welcomed it.

  The sex researcher Havelock Ellis, who said he had recognized the attractive, self-possessed Hall as a lesbian upon first meeting her at a party, wrote her that he would look forward to providing a critical blurb for her book, due to his intense interest in the subject. Unlike the punishing attitudes of earlier sexologists, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Ellis was of the new school, well acquainted with Freud’s theories of the bisexual nature of men and women. Freud’s basic concept of human sexuality, though different from Ellis’s, was equally humane for its time.

  Blanche, who had long enjoyed thinking outside the boundaries of polite society, was as excited about publishing The Well of Loneliness as she’d been about any manuscript. It was likely her reading about psychoanalysis and sexuality, during an era when both were intellectually serious subjects—as well as the language of the speakeasies—that motivated her to publish Hall’s novel.