Her fall trip was so successful that as soon as she returned to New York, she started planning her buying trip for January. When she was reminded that Florence Heifetz was throwing a surprise birthday party for Jascha on February 2, she decided to stay in Manhattan another month instead. Fortuitously, her change of plans allowed her time to review Knopf’s finances, supposedly left in top shape by Sam. Instead, as she delved more deeply, she was horrified at the mess she found: Knopf was unable, she realized, to meet their $75,000 note due the Bank of Manhattan.
On March 21, 1935, Alfred, Blanche, and Joe Lesser assessed Knopf’s financial reality: they were about to default on a loan. Alfred closed up the Purchase house (later renting “the Hovel” to Harry Winston, the “diamond king”) and took up temporary residence at Delmonico’s, rather than stay in Blanche’s extra bedroom at 400 East Fifty-Seventh. He swapped his hotel bill for free advertising in The American Mercury. The Knopfs immediately contacted an attorney who had gotten other publishing firms out of financial difficulty.
“We were in real trouble,” Alfred later admitted. But rather than accept responsibility for the company’s management, Alfred impugned the entire banking profession, referring to “men who lent you an umbrella when the sun is shining but refuse you when it rains.”14 After one of the Knopfs’ Irving Trust bankers, at a branch on Madison Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street (where Sam had maintained a connection for years), was shocked to see that “you’ve been using the banks for capital,” Alfred sniffed, later commending his self-restraint in not countering, “Any fool could see that.”15 While serving as business manager of the Knopf firm, Sam had apparently overvalued its inventory and even used his own money to buy numerous shares of the company stock at an inflated worth. The branch manager, Charles Fagg, now insisted that Alfred assign to the bank the life insurance Sam had taken out on his son years before, with a current face value of $300,000 (about $5.2 million today).
Alfred also held a personal account at Irving Trust, where his old friend Felix Warburg sat next to Fagg. Now Alfred complained to anyone who would listen that Knopf had been told that instead of using Irving Trust for both their personal and their professional accounts, the Knopfs should have a second bank with which they could always pay off loans from the first. Every year both banks set their line of credit at $200,000, so that “we could actually borrow up to $400,000.” Their bankers, Alfred later lamented, “hadn’t understood a book publisher’s balance sheet too well or one of them might have years before discovered how greatly we over-valued our inventory.”16
Nor was Charles Fagg, associate of Felix Warburg or not, willing to give the Knopfs a break. Alfred then turned to his lawyer friend Jim Rosenberg, who had helped him buy the Purchase house. The Knopfs borrowed $40,000—$30,000 from Jim, and $10,000 from another acquaintance. (When the Knopfs paid back the loans two years later, the men refused any interest.) As if Blanche had not begged her husband years before to keep Sam out of the business, Alfred took from the current disaster his own strange lesson: his two best friends had “proved an unique exception to the conviction that Blanche and I had … arrived at that the only money worthwhile in a personal business is what you supply yourself and that the price of outside capital comes too high.”17
Belatedly, both Knopfs turned to the Cheney report on American book trade economics published in early 1932. Throughout a study declaring poor distribution of books the “tragedy of the book industry,” O. H. Cheney, in a rigorous reading of the American publishing industry, talked hard facts, some of which resonate to this day.18 The Knopfs’ overdue attention to the report resulted in their developing “a set of useful statistics,” recording them in what they thereafter called their “black book.” When he was alive, Sam Knopf had done things his way, and now, with this new (actually conventional) method—and without Sam around—they could “project [their] sales and cash positions at least a year ahead.”19
* * *
“It all seems so unbelievably dreadful that there is nothing to be said … All I wanted you to know is that I am here and will come down if you want me and if I can do anything for you … I am afraid I am never good at saying what is really in my mind. But perhaps you will understand.”20 Consumed with Knopf’s financial woes, Blanche had been slow to register that Mencken’s wife was seriously ill. She had failed to read between the lines of the insouciant letters Mencken had sent her in the past months. Though she knew that Sara was struggling with what was then called her post-tubercular lungs, she had no idea of the gravity of the situation.
In May, Henry sent Blanche a blunt note: Sara was, it seemed, sicker than anyone had realized. In April, she had returned to Johns Hopkins, where Henry, optimistic, noted that the crocuses were already in bloom. He wrote Blanche that he was “very hopeful that her rest cure will rid her of her troubles permanently.”21 Instead Sara deteriorated, and now, his wife still in the hospital, Mencken wrote Blanche in a telegram that “the poor girl has had a horrible year. She has born it bravely, but if the quacks don’t turn her loose pretty soon I think she’ll begin to shoot.”22
Later that day, Blanche sent Mencken a telegram that she would be at her office that afternoon from three on. She signed the message “desperately sorry love Blanche.”23 On Wednesday, May 29, a lumbar puncture revealed tubercular meningitis (usually fatal) in Sara’s spinal fluid. But before Blanche got down to Baltimore, on Friday, May 31, 1935, Mencken’s wife of five years was dead. Mencken was so “dazed with grief” that he was incapable of making funeral arrangements, and, refusing to look at her lifeless body, he immediately had her cremated and placed in a plot in Baltimore’s Loudon Park beside one reserved for him.24
The newspaperman, quietly devastated, wrote in his journal only once the rest of that year. That entry concerned his lifelong obsession with the number 13—the day of Sara’s death, 31, reversed: “I came down from New York yesterday, Friday the 13th, leaving on the 11.30 train, Eastern Standard Time. There is another 13 in 11.30. The Pullman agent gave me seat No. 13 in car 231. Another 13 in 231, this time reversed. I fully expected the train to roll off the track.”25
It took five years for Mencken to mention Sara’s death directly. On May 31, 1940, he wrote: “I still think of Sara every day of my life, and almost every hour of the day … I am always thinking of things to tell her.”26 In the aftermath of Sara’s death, Mencken busied himself preparing her collection of short stories and memoirs, Southern Album, to be published by Doubleday, which had put out her novel The Making of a Lady in 1931, to avoid any conflict of interest with Knopf.
14
HARBINGERS OF WAR
MENCKEN’S GRIEF OVER SARA’S DEATH caused Blanche to register her own loneliness more acutely. She was pleased when Pat, on holiday from Exeter, chose to live with her again at 400 East Fifty-Seventh Street, occupying the extra bedroom, as he had the previous summer. Pat would later say that he liked the ambience of life with his mother. From parties with Noël Coward playing his latest songs in their apartment to seeing her off to work in the morning, he enjoyed being with her. He noticed that even at the office she had style: a porkpie hat and a gold “BK” pin on her jacket lapel became her trademarks.1
Pat could be jealous of male guests who showed up too often. Eddie Wasserman, Blanche’s friend from the 1920s, was still actively hoping for a chance, and Pat sensed his mother was ready to give it to him. Even Eddie realized, however, that no matter how much he idolized Blanche, for her theirs was a relationship of convenience. To show his affection, he bought Blanche a new car, a yellow Ford Phaeton convertible (she rarely drove it and never with the top down). For once, Blanche’s paramour gave her a gift, instead of the other way around.2 She told Mencken that Eddie was her “walker,”3 but Joe Lesser thought he was Blanche’s lover.4 In any event, Pat, who said that his mother “hung out with fairies” (Wasserman was assumed to be a closeted homosexual), recalled decades later that his father was infuriated at the gift.5 Blanche’s friend Judith Anderson recalle
d Eddie as being “very fond of Blanche,” and “fun, very brilliant … with a charming apartment” where everyone “from New York and Paris went in 1935.”6 Blanche eventually gave Eddie her signature gift of a gold Dunhill lighter with his initials engraved, implying (if only for appearance’s sake) that they were lovers.
When Pat went to Wyoming to spend the rest of the summer at a dude ranch, Blanche took off for Europe, returning in September to get him back to school. The Knopfs’ summer trips bore no signs of downsizing: advance sales by the summer of 1935 showed the business back in strong financial shape, for now at least, chiefly through the publications of Clarence Day’s memoir Life with Father and Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart, a novel about a young woman living on the Platte River in Nebraska—whose desire for a richer life leads to her death.
At the end of the summer, Alfred took his first flight—to Los Angeles to visit his brother, Edwin—and then traveled by train to Albuquerque to meet Conrad Richter, whose manuscript he knew Blanche wanted to see. That trip opened Alfred’s eyes to the beauty of the Southwest, which soon became a beloved part of the American landscape for him. Blanche, alone at her Midtown apartment throughout her son’s school year, now accompanied her husband socially only when she had to. Together they appeared at the “brilliant first performance” of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess when it premiered at the Alvin Theatre on October 10, 1935. And together they attended the gala in Gershwin’s honor given by Condé Nast at his Park Avenue duplex.7
Blanche would have preferred to be escorted by Mencken, but she respected his wish to remain a friend to both Knopfs. She sent him her own holiday presents, and on December 22, 1935, he wrote her that “those magnificent herring came in just in time for my Sabbath supper … They arrived without a scratch, and looking like the Crown Jewels. My very best thanks. But in conscience I must add the corollary: Christmas be damned.”8 She also made a list of tasks he might do for her while she was abroad the next month, doubtless because she wanted to keep him occupied while he mourned Sara.
In January, Dashiell Hammett less successfully tried to elicit Blanche’s sympathy. Forced to deal with Hammett’s need for nearconstant babysitting, Blanche was now privy to his confidence at a Black Mask writers’ dinner in Los Angeles: he’d contracted the clap. He flew back to New York, where he checked into Lenox Hill Hospital until early February, during which time Blanche sent him books to read as well as reminding him, halfheartedly, of his promise to deliver a new novel by the end of the year.
But that January also saw Blanche meeting briefly with Elizabeth Bowen in London, the two bonding immediately, with Blanche’s enthusiasm over the upcoming American publication of The House in Paris predisposing Bowen to like her at once. The House in Paris appeared to strong reviews in early 1936. When the book came out in England a year earlier, Virginia Woolf had lavished praise upon it, surprised at how much Bowen’s world intersected with her own. Indeed, the story’s tone felt distinctly influenced by Woolf. Bowen kept peeling back its imperturbable and aloof outer shell until a sometimes vicious core emerged, only to end at the beginning: a daylong account of two adolescents trying to get home, wherever that turned out to be.
The novel received raves in the American press as well, if less than spectacular results at the cash register: The New York Times said The House in Paris was “indisputably the best of Miss Bowen’s novels. It has all the sensitive qualities of its predecessors combined with greater warmth and feeling.” The Saturday Review of Literature said, “The author has a sentient intuition for the depths and complexities of personality and she has the imaginative intelligence to make human relationship the raison d’etre of an unstereotyped, interesting novel.” The Nation dissented: the lack of a large (probably Russian-type) framework deprived the novel’s readers of the grand passions implied but coolly withheld.9 Most important, both for the number of copies sold and for generating publicity, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
For a few months, Blanche was at ease. On January 14, 1936, Jascha Heifetz played a benefit at Carnegie Hall for the New York Women’s Trade Union League. Eleanor Roosevelt was the chair of the benefit committee, which included Mrs. Andrew Carnegie, Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, and others. Later in the month the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a grand Van Gogh exhibition that Blanche was eager to see. She also planned to attend the performances of the Ballet Russe, where she would relish the dancers’ graceful and athletic movement. And in an increasingly rare instance of the Knopfs being together socially twice in one month, Blanche and Alfred were back at Carnegie Hall to honor their British friend the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. When they checked in at the Fifty-Sixth Street entrance, the longtime house manager, John Totten, told them, to their surprise, “Your friends are here,” meaning Koussevitzky and his wife, Natalya.
Beecham was sailing home the next day and had invited the Knopfs to a “supper party” at the Savoy-Plaza after the concert, the hotel where, Blanche well knew, the Koussevitzkys always stayed. After the concert, the Knopfs proceeded to Beecham’s party at the hotel, and while Blanche was in the powder room, Natalya walked in. She insisted that the couple come up to their suite. Thinking they’d stay just a few minutes, the Knopfs relented. Once Serge opened the door, however, embracing them as Natalya said, “Look what I found,” Lord Beecham’s party was forgotten.
That summer, after Alfred learned that his wife was planning to take Pat to the Gaspé Peninsula near Quebec, he preempted her by suggesting to their son that the two of them—and Blanche, too, if she wanted—first go on a canoe trip together (for which Alfred grew a beard “rather like Joseph Conrad’s”).10 Asking friends for recommendations, he settled on the Cains River in New Brunswick. The little crew, Blanche included, spent the night in Fredericton and then, taking a train with guides early the next morning, dropped off their equipment at a nearby point on the river. That’s when Blanche decided to turn back. The whole experience was too primitive for her taste, and between swatting at the mosquitoes and slipping in the mud, she decided to let it be a boys-only event. Managing some good fly casting that evening, Alfred and Pat then “struck mostly shallow water and had to slosh through it on foot and pull the canoes.”11 When Blanche and Pat each arrived home separately in late summer, they immediately took off for their long-planned vacation to Gaspé, Blanche hoping to match Alfred’s adventure.
Little record remains of the mother-son trip, and Pat was soon back at school, while Blanche took off for Paris and London. Through the Knopf writer Paul Gallico, who had come to Berlin for the 1936 summer Olympics, she was introduced to William Shirer. After only a few minutes of talk, Blanche, as ever trusting her instincts, told the reporter to forget about his novel and let her sign right away the diary Shirer told her he was keeping. Impressed by her perseverance, Shirer suggested they talk again in a few years. The reporter would later boast that when he first met Blanche there were rumors that “she was sort of crazy to go to bed with me, but she never made any advances.”12 Shirer didn’t yet realize that Blanche could sound like a seductress when she went hunting for books. She would cable Shirer frequently after their meeting, convincing him to keep detailed notes when back in Berlin, where he was on assignment for the International News Service, followed by CBS. Later, she arranged meetings with the journalist in Paris and London as well.
The revelations in Shirer’s diaries, written over the previous few years and given to Blanche to read in rough form, had both appalled and enlightened her. Shirer had thought it a good idea, for instance, to observe the September 1934 Nuremberg Rally to take his own measure of the country. Held since 1923 as the yearly gathering of Germany’s Nazi Party, the event, following Hitler’s rise to power, had evolved into an annual propaganda show. This year, before Shirer had even settled into his hotel, he’d found himself stuck in front of Hitler’s hotel, among a mob of ten thousand shouting: “We want our Führer!”
Shirer detailed his 1934 experience, saying: “I was a little shocked at
the faces … They reminded me of the crazed expressions I once saw in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers … they looked up at [Hitler] as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman.”13
When Blanche herself traveled to Berlin after her brief stop in Paris, she saw bedlam everywhere. Distressed by the obviously unstable Deutschland, she told a New York Times reporter on July 14, 1936: “There is not a German writer left in Germany who is worth thinking about. The gifted writers and enterprising publishers who had any independence have left Germany. [Thomas Mann had fled to Switzerland.] Only the Nazi writers and publishers remain so as to please the Nazi government.”
Around this time, Mencken, who had entirely miscalculated the severity of the German political scene, advised Blanche against publishing books on the history of Jewish persecution. She needn’t worry, Mencken assured her: the “Baltimore Sun … and the leading Jewish organizations of the [United States] … say that the slaughter of Jews in Germany is imaginary.”14 Since Blanche considered Mencken one of America’s most acute political thinkers, she hoped he was right.
She was pleased to tell him that the second edition of The American Language had increased its sales that year to 9,274 copies, an impressive achievement for a reference book. From now on, the compendium would be issued as a two-volume set. Mencken was gratified, but he was also concerned about Blanche’s health. There were rumors of her being sick, and when he confronted her, she crumbled. She was struggling with a severe nerve pain on one side of her face, a horrible sensation that seemed to last forever when it was really just a few seconds or minutes. Her friend insisted she return with him to Baltimore to see his ophthalmologist at Hopkins, where she had already met his internist, Benjamin Baker (later to become General Douglas MacArthur’s consultant). There was nothing the doctors could do. Her vision continued to blur occasionally, though she admitted her disability to a select few, wearing glasses only in private. When Henry suggested that her odd request for an all-black bathroom at the Purchase house was ill-advised—due to her sight, if nothing else—she refused to listen, determined to make her feelings about the dark domicile clear, and black it was.15 She would seldom be at the country house anyway.
The Lady with the Borzoi Page 17
