That summer, after leaving Baden-Baden, Blanche met the author for a celebratory lunch at London’s elegant Maison Basque. But before Blanche could get her hands on the printed and gathered sheets promised her by the English publisher, John Lane, what many consider the most important twentieth-century novel about lesbianism was derailed by the British censors on grounds of immorality. When Blanche protested, the Knopfs were warned that a legal conflict backed by the forces of the vice fighter John Sumner could literally bankrupt their company. Scoffing at the accusations of obscenity, but fearful of losing costly court battles, the couple didn’t want to risk fighting and instead accepted an offer from a relatively new publisher, Covici-Friede, to pay for the available sheets and take ownership of the manuscript.
Blanche wrote John Lane that the four professionals her firm had paid to read the novel agreed its writer was gifted and could probably anticipate a “distinguished career.” She commended Hall’s ability to “deal with a very delicate subject and one that might be regarded by many as taboo … without offense.” Nonetheless, a disappointing conclusion followed:
On August 19 the book was viciously attacked by a leading article in the (London) Sunday Express … and four days later John Lane withdrew the book. We … have come to the conclusion definitely not to publish [it] … It would be purchased by many as a pornographic work pure and simple … It seems a great pity that the fate of THE WELL OF LONELINESS had been what it has been, but we consider that … much harm could possibly be done by our permitting the book to appear in print.10
After The Well of Loneliness was banned, Radclyffe Hall gave a reading to a packed audience at Natalie Barney’s Paris salon at 20, rue Jacob. A year earlier, Barney had decided to feature only women writers at her newly formed Académie des Femmes, among them Colette, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Djuna Barnes. Blanche continued to go to Barney’s events, accompanied by Jenny Bradley—who with her husband, William, was herself increasingly respected for their Parisian salon at 18, rue du Bac. It seems likely that Blanche was introduced to Ezra Pound, whom she would sign to Knopf, at Barney’s house. The two had often been present at the pointedly feminine salon, with its red damask floors and ceiling painted with nymphs—or at the Bradleys.
A regular reader of British Vogue, Blanche must have swallowed hard when the magazine’s fashion editor, Madge Garland, interviewed Radclyffe Hall, then “the most scandalous woman in London.” The Well of Loneliness was “never to be seen on anyone’s table or bookshelf but read by all in secret.”11 By September 1930, after it was finally cleared of John Sumner’s charges of obscenity by the New York Court of Special Sessions, The Well of Loneliness, published by Covici-Friede, had sold a hundred thousand copies.12
At least Blanche would soon have a room of her own. During the fall of 1928, the house in Purchase, less than thirty miles from Manhattan, was finally finished. Blanche would maintain her own Midtown apartment of “ample size” on the third floor at 400 East Fifty-Seventh Street, giving up the Fifth Avenue apartment. She may have been emboldened to live separately by Van Vechten’s wife, Fania, who insisted that she and her husband maintain two apartments, side by side, at 101 Central Park West. When Carl got drunk he would sometimes chase Fania with a knife, so the actress felt that living apart was the sensible thing to do.13 In any event, Blanche’s decision to live apart from Alfred while staying in the marriage was irregular but not unheard-of. During this postwar period various unorthodox household arrangements were played out among Natalie Barney’s French contingent as well as the English Bloomsbury crowd—but they were not an everyday occurrence in Blanche’s American world.14
Alfred’s enthusiasm for the country (as Westchester County was then considered), with Blanche a born-and-bred city girl, became the most convenient way to explain their separate living arrangements. Blanche would stay in Purchase a few weekends a month when Pat was home from school. Friends found Alfred’s long-awaited edifice gloomy, its hard, backless wooden benches making for uncomfortable seats at the dining table. To some, it seemed as if the new house was meant to be intimidating.
For her own apartment, Blanche was inspired by the salons she had attended in Paris. She had decided an eclectic, inviting mode was most attractive. Once again, however, her father-in-law “interfered and insisted on my living way beyond my means in a very expensive place”—which Sam subsidized, she recalled. “Mrs. Knopf,” she wrote, speaking of herself in Sam’s voice, “could not live in a simple place but had to look like what she never could be or wanted to be … I gave up,” she continued, “entertained on a large scale and lived this way for years until I moved into a small apartment of my own.”15
Until Blanche got her “small apartment,” living in a style paid for by Sam was surely not as difficult as she remembered, except for her unruly staff: according to the Knopf assistant Toni Pasquale, Sam hired her two servants, a drunken cook, and a surly French maid, in a spacious home “all in white—the carpet, the bedrooms and linen, the curtains, the walls, the bathrooms and towels: she used white paint and white peonies, nuit et jour, everything an almost defiant shiny white, a color whose feminine form in French was her own name. Always one deep red rosebud in a white porcelain vase took pride of place, bought daily at a bodega or imported by a florist during the winter,” Pasquale remembered.16 That “defiant shiny Blanc” alongside a bold stroke of scarlet played to Blanche’s love of extremes, cultivated in 1915 at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, with its explosion of color in the Tower of Jewels set among neutral shades of architecture tending toward the neoclassical. Again, Blanche took her pleasure from mixing things up till she hit upon the exact note she was after.
10
HER OWN WOMAN
BLANCHE WAS SADDENED, as the end of 1928 approached, to hear that forty-three-year-old Elinor Wylie, with whom she’d had lunch the previous week, had died of a stroke. In June Knopf had published Wylie’s third book of poetry, Trivial Breath, and in 1929 they would release posthumously her collection Angels and Earthly Creatures—a series of nineteen sonnets that Wylie had already distributed privately. From the start of their acquaintance, Blanche had felt a kinship with Wylie and envied her sexual freedom. Like Blanche, the poet lived in her own apartment away from her husband. Wylie’s supple intelligence and the care she took to look good were akin to Blanche’s own, though Wylie’s vanity was neurotic. Friends knew to compliment her as the most beautiful woman in view, or she became hysterical, bursting into tears or running out of the room.1 Even Blanche had tensed up whenever Wylie mentioned her “hallucination of being a reincarnated [Percy Bysshe] Shelley,” the publisher highly skeptical of such beliefs.2 At the private memorial in Elinor’s apartment, Blanche talked with their mutual friend Edna St. Vincent Millay, along with Carl Van Doren, one of the nine or ten mourners who most admired Wylie’s poetry.
Pained at Wylie’s death, Blanche was, on the other hand, happy to be rid of Joseph Hergesheimer. Hergesheimer had lost his cachet by the time the New York Stock Exchange crashed, and the Knopfs’ London friend Desmond Flower acquired him from Knopf, a change too late to be worthwhile for anyone. Even the zany Anita Loos warned Flower that despite Hergesheimer’s real if dated talent, the short, corpulent writer was a target for jokes. The forty-eight-year-old, long-married Hergesheimer presented himself as a “Casanova” as he pursued “vacuous socialites.”3 A Philadelphia judge wrote the Knopfs that he had long realized that Hergesheimer was a “significant grotesque. Essentially a buffoon, he posed as a gentleman from Philadelphia … I can imagine that everyone who ever knew the man sooner or later came to hate him, personally.”4
If Hergesheimer’s fame was at an end, the author Blanche had discovered in her slush pile while in the hospital was pursuing his. Working with Dashiell Hammett, an alcoholic, had been difficult from the start. Blanche had found him “a singularly reserved man, laconic and normally undemonstrative.”5 Later the publisher would receive tributes for her efforts: “It w
as Blanche Knopf, Alfred’s wife, who would see Hammett’s promise as a writer and would act as editor for his first book,” Richard Layman, one of his biographers, writes.6 William Nolan, another Hammett biographer, asserts that Blanche was a “brilliant woman with a keen appreciation of good writing.” Nolan believes that Blanche “had a cool, knowledgeable eye” that allowed her to “influence the careers of the best of the hard-boiled writers [including Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain].”7
Often too drunk or broke to meet publishing deadlines, Hammett proved harder to work with than any of Blanche’s previous authors. Luckily, by now Blanche had learned that an editor’s resolve was just what lackadaisical writers needed. She must have known that in Hammett she had discovered the real article, a writer who wrote prose as clean and spare as that of Hemingway, to whom he would most often be compared, and with a voice that, as his biographer Diane Johnson says, “spoke of a personal code of ethics in a modern world whose institutions were corrupt.”8 Like Hemingway, who was admired by Hammett, the ex-detective needed constant babysitting to keep him sober—and to put his pen to paper. When Hammett attended Blanche’s parties, he inevitably misbehaved. One night he got so drunk that Blanche had to lock him in the bathroom to allow the other guests to listen to Myra Hess play the piano.9
At the Knopfs’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, five years after Hammett’s death, Blanche would recall telling Hammett that Knopf would publish Red Harvest only if he’d “cut out 75 murders and he agreed.”10 She believed his strength lay partly in his terseness. As the Hammett biographer Sally Cline says, Hammett’s “held-in sentences … convey male menace: ‘Babe liked Sue. Vassos liked Sue. Sue liked Babe. Vassos didn’t like that.’”11 By the end of 1930, Hammett’s reviews “were brilliant,” with Knopf running an advertisement claiming that Hammett was “Better than Hemingway.”12 The writer was “recognized as an innovator in the hard-boiled school.”13 Indeed, Knopf’s own André Gide would say that Hammett was America’s “worthiest novelist”—because he never corrupted his art with morality, in spite of the ex-detective’s personal code.14 When Knopf had first published Hammett’s Red Harvest on February 1, 1929, The New York Times seemed unaware of the book or its author. Vindication came eighty years later, when Red Harvest appeared on the 2010 Time magazine list of the hundred best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
Now, a mere six months after the release of Red Harvest, Blanche had to get The Dain Curse into shape. Unlike the earlier book, The Dain Curse, published July 19, 1929, would immediately receive a New York Times review, lauding Hammett’s ability to “put people down as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.” Praised for his realism, the detective writer “allowed murder to occur on, not offstage, and the book was fast-moving if intricately and realistically plotted”—though, as Blanche realized, disjointed, like the author himself.15 Hammett, who seemed to those who knew him to have been the model for the main character in The Dain Curse—tall, lean, neat dresser, mustache, and a penchant for gambling—occupied too much of Blanche’s time with his need for close supervision. How, she wondered, could she convince him to keep writing and forgo the bottle?
While working on The Maltese Falcon, Hammett started asking for frequent advance payments against his royalties, and Blanche decided he would have to show her what he’d written before she’d give him more money. She disliked treating him like a child, but she believed the book would be a breakthrough in the genre. The author was using the third person rather than his usual first-person voice, the change allowing him more authorial distance as well as a convincing new tone.
Blanche was sidetracked from her author when she tripped over a branch that had fallen near her office and broke her collarbone. Despite her worries over Hammett, her slow-to-heal fracture, and her preoccupation with Knopf’s autumn list, the publisher, like so many women writers (including Willa Cather, who recommended Virginia Woolf to friends), could have only rejoiced when, on October 24, the Hogarth Press (established by Woolf and her husband, Leonard, in 1917) released Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Blanche had long been interested in Woolf’s work (her writing first appeared soon after Blanche had graduated from Gardner), especially now, after having been forced to forgo Radclyffe Hall’s novel. Based on a series of lectures Woolf had delivered at two women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge the previous year, A Room of One’s Own spoke of the literal and figurative spaces women writers needed—and deserved—if they were ever to achieve on the scale that men did. Of particular interest to Blanche was Woolf’s discussion of the critic Desmond MacCarthy’s dismissal of Rebecca West, a friend to both women. West had responded to MacCarthy’s blast at her feminism calmly: “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”16
A desire to be her own woman was more than ever at the fore of Blanche’s thinking, but, paradoxically, such an inclination demanded perpetual dieting and smoking, too. Though as the twenties ended, many American women welcomed softer angles, Blanche did not. According to Pat, she began seeing a “Viennese diet doctor” in 1929 and was “put on a diet that eventually destroyed her,” along with her “thousand organic ailments.”17
* * *
Alfred seemed preoccupied with relocating Knopf’s offices to Purchase: Mencken was right; the future lay outside big cities, he decided. Traffic jams and the costs of outfitting huge populations with utilities and water meant that urban centers had reached their limit.18 Clearly, the Knopfs should move their business to Westchester County. Van Vechten found such a measure ill-advised, especially in light of his dire prediction for the future of publishing itself. He quoted the novelist and his fellow midwesterner Booth Tarkington’s belief that “the public had practically ceased to read owing to radio, talking pictures and what not … When television in the home [became] practical no one would ever open a book.”19
Such worries struck Blanche as groundless, even silly, and she believed they evidenced fears stirred by the stock market crash. Knopf publishing and the profession itself still looked to be in good shape. The December holiday season, including the treasurer’s report that all was well with the business, put her in a great mood for the New Year’s gathering at the Heifetzes. For years a crowd would gather around 5:00 a.m. at the violinist’s Park Avenue penthouse, which he and his wife were renting for $25,000 a year (equivalent in 2015 to about $333,000). There they would listen to Heifetz and several of his friends perform.
Jascha’s wife, Florence Vidor Heifetz, the beautiful silent-film actress previously married to King Vidor, recalled years later how “fun and gay” their parties were: “It didn’t matter if people were tired or drunk. We’d open the curtains and dawn would break. Then we’d have breakfast—and ping pong. Gershwin and Jascha loved to play ping pong.” By the second or third holiday celebration at the Heifetzes, Blanche and Jascha had become lovers—while both Florence and Alfred apparently looked the other way.20
In spite of the crash weighing down much of New York City—along with the rest of the country and even the world—life remained sweet for Knopf during the first months of 1930, with Blanche returning from her buying trip abroad to enthusiastic reviews of The Maltese Falcon. An immediate success, the book was reprinted seven times that first year. At times the praise seemed unending, with everyone agreeing that “it was the best American detective story to date.” The New Republic critic Donald Douglas claimed that Hammett’s novels showed readers “the absolute distinction of real art.”21 Van Vechten chimed in, surely at Blanche’s request: “Hammett is raising the detective story to that plane to which Alexandre Dumas raised the historical novel.”22
Hammett celebrated by giving himself a makeover. He had his striking gray hair styled into a pompadour and grew a mustache that he would keep for most of his life, he got his rotten teeth fixed, an
d he started showing off his lean body in close-fitting clothes. His friends thought he had become a dandy.23 The Maltese Falcon helped to protect Knopf from the financial disaster the rest of the country faced. In late June, Warner Bros. offered Knopf $8,500 for the film rights, signaling the strong possibility that a movie would be made. When the producer David O. Selznick, then working for Paramount, heard about the Warner proposal, he bid higher and won the rights himself.
Blanche spent a fair amount of that spring in Mencken’s company, often in Baltimore. But she sensed that their collegial forays into the surrounding countryside were coming to an end; rumors were flying about several women who’d caught her friend’s eye. Still, Mencken wrote Blanche to prepare for a Hoboken pilgrimage with Van Vechten in late April, when the three friends would meet first at the Algonquin at 6:00, “take a small stimulant,” and then set upon their journey.24
Soon Henry confirmed his otherwise closely guarded secret. He and Sara Haardt were to be married at the end of the summer. Mencken had courted her sporadically for seven years, while continuing to enjoy his bachelorhood. Not the beauty that his other girlfriends had been, Sara, who had led (unsuccessful) efforts in her home state of Alabama to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, met Mencken in 1923, when she spoke to him after his lecture at Goucher College. (An English professor at the school, she wrote newspaper reviews, articles, and essays.) Even as the couple announced their engagement, their happiness was shadowed: doctors had told them that the tubercular Sara had at most five years to live.
But there was no talk of mortality on August 27, 1930, when, a week after the couple got their license at City Hall (with Mencken blushing furiously while newspapers’ cameras flashed), they married. The young woman from Mobile had gone to school with Zelda Sayre (with whom she would remain friends until the Fitzgeralds’ drinking became untenable).
The Lady with the Borzoi Page 14
