That November Blanche went on a few day trips with Alfred, after the couple threw their annual party to celebrate Koussevitzky’s opening of the New York concert season. They stopped at the Old Drovers Inn, a historic bed-and-breakfast in Dover Plains, near Poughkeepsie, and then started off to the Troutbeck Estate (a frequent stopover for the writer/naturalist John Burroughs) to see Joel and Amy Spingarn, old friends instrumental in the work of the NAACP. They planned to stay overnight at the Spingarns’ historic home, just outside the town of Amenia in the Hudson Valley. But the night proved colder than anyone had expected, and since the Knopfs’ garage had failed to put antifreeze in their Ford, the engine froze, making it impossible for them to continue their trip. When their car eventually came back to life, Blanche returned to the city to hear about a surgical procedure Mencken was undergoing in Baltimore over the December holidays; she urged him to get away while he healed from what, given his uncharacteristic discretion, was probably a prostate operation.
Early in the new year, Henry took Blanche’s advice and recuperated at Daytona Beach, where Blanche sent him a note saying that she wanted to commission a fancy Florida rendition of the Knopf logo—something Mencken could oversee while she was on her seasonal business trip abroad. Her instructions were to produce a truly original piece, and Mencken relished the assignment. Uncertain of the reason for “the first Borzoi lamp ever made on this coast,” a resident sculptor took on the commission. The lamp was a monstrosity of surrealist and Biedermeier flourishes, its shade made of “oyster shells, red berries, gilt buttons, and palm nuts.” Enchanted, Blanche wired Mencken, urging him to hurry back to all those who loved him.16 What she finally made of the lamp goes unnoted, but it probably became a gift for a writer or agent abroad—or perhaps a present for her husband.
On her last overseas trip, Blanche had had a fortuitous meeting with D. H. Lawrence’s friend the author Aldous Huxley, with whom she felt an immediate bond due to his kindness toward and appreciation of Lawrence, whose letters Huxley had edited after the writer’s death in 1930. Only forty-four, Lawrence had died in Vence, a region in southeastern France between Nice and Antibes, of pulmonary tuberculosis, with Aldous and Maria Huxley tending him during his illness. In addition to such faithfulness, Blanche also admired Huxley’s pacifist views, and she felt an added kinship due to his partial blindness. Within months of Blanche’s return from Europe, the Knopfs were joining the couple for lunch in Rhinebeck, New York, a two-hour drive from Midtown Manhattan.
They met at the home of the Huxleys’ improbable friends William and Marjory (Worthington) Seabrook, he a famous student of the occult, eater of human flesh, and mental patient. Harcourt, Brace had published Seabrook’s Jungle Ways in 1931, in which the student of exotica, embedded among the friendly tribes of West Africa, had been offered a cutting from the flank of a thirty-year-old man “freshly” killed in an accident. The human meat was excellent, the “cooking odors, wholly pleasant, were like those of beefsteak and roast beef.”17 Jungle Ways was dedicated to Paul Morand, an anti-Semitic modernist writer who would support the Vichy government. Though Seabrook was prolific, there is no suggestion that Blanche ever asked him for a book. In 1945, eight years after her lunch with him, the anthropologist committed suicide.
* * *
In late April 1937, Henry ventured to a cocktail party given by the Knopfs to show off their new offices at 501 Madison Avenue, where, though “Blanche dragged me into it,” he “escaped after a few minutes, and without drinking any of the cocktails.”18 Blanche’s party was given a two-page spread in Publishers Weekly, complete with photographs of the couple’s offices and the anteroom to the sixteenth-floor reception area. Shiny black linoleum floor, dull black walls, indirect lighting, and a “large doorway of natural walnut” led into the lobby papered with jackets of Knopf’s most celebrated publications. Beyond was the blue-and-beige reception room, “accented by natural walnut, glass and polished brass.” The firm’s current books were displayed in a “long, narrow illumined case recessed in the north wall.” Blanche’s pleasure in mixing periods resulted in a comfortable library that featured modern shelving, Chippendale chairs, and a Persian rug. Alfred’s office was notable for its heavy, dark wood antique desk, surrounded by “original Beerbohm drawings and old maps framed in bamboo,” while Blanche’s was “completely modern … its color scheme off-white and beige with striking [red] accents.” She had two windows, the larger looking west and the other facing diagonally down over the spire of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with one of her walls “completely composed of bookshelves, the other walls covered in a neutral grass cloth.” Blanche’s desk was light walnut, and she had “three small round modern chairs upholstered in brilliant crimson corduroy for seating visitors.”19
Mencken recorded in his diary his concerns: Knopf was making very little profit and would need some popular books to stay afloat. There was a price Knopf paid for remaining small, unlike such up-and-coming-firms as Doubleday, Random House, and Simon & Schuster. As the former Knopf publicity director Pete Lemay explains, “The medium-sized house of Knopf maintained a solid financial position by publishing steady selling fiction and non-fiction instead of very popular best sellers … [The Knopfs] turned down a number of best-selling writers because … they wanted to maintain the high literary standards that made [the] company notable.”20
In 1937, concerned that a recession loomed, the Knopfs again decided to rent out their Purchase house for the summer, this time to Carol and Carl Pforzheimer. Alfred and Blanche alternated weeks at a cottage in Falmouth on Cape Cod, where Alfred sailed and played tennis and Blanche typically read outside in a deck chair. Although they were not together, somehow the couple still managed to fight over who should invite Mencken to stay at the bungalow. Unsurprisingly, he never found the time to visit either one of them.
Before the vacation got off the ground, their friend George Gershwin died of brain cancer at the age of thirty-eight. His Porgy and Bess (later deemed an operatic masterpiece) had been judged unsuccessful, and he had recently moved to Los Angeles to work on movie scores. Within months, however, he began suffering various neurological oddities, from perceiving the phantom smell of burning rubber to attempting to push his driver out of the car. Unable to eat without spilling food, he was taken to Cedars of Lebanon, a hospital in Hollywood, where he was diagnosed as a hysteric and released. Two weeks later, unable to speak or move normally, Gershwin was rushed back to the hospital, where he died within days.
His casket brought on a train back to New York for his funeral at Temple Emanu-El, Gershwin was honored by more than 3,500 mourners, with another thousand standing outside the building in the drizzling rain. Though Blanche and Alfred were surely there, the only Knopf listed among the guests was the movie producer Edwin Knopf. Edwin had remained among Gershwin’s closest friends since their getaway to Asheville for the composer to finish Rhapsody in Blue.21 And the honorary pallbearer, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, son of a Jewish mother and an Italian father, was the perfect symbol of the city and its music as Gershwin and his fans heard it—New York City first and foremost.
Again for less-than-gratifying reasons, the Knopfs were brought together during the summer of 1937. Pat, who’d stayed in New York City to retake a course he’d failed at Exeter, finally graduated in August—and promptly ran away from home. In a note written to his parents, he said he was depressed over being turned down by Princeton and intended not to return until he made good. Following a police search, he was found in Salt Lake City, “sleeping on a lawn,” because only “truck drivers” would lend him a hand: as if mimicking his father’s way of talking, he complained that “the rest of the population was a bunch of damned snobs.” Pat had stayed on a park bench while “police in seven states” looked for him. Once he was found, his parents were quickly contacted, and they flew out to get him. Alfred seemed almost proud of Pat’s behavior, while Blanche, who’d been frantically calling police around the country, was furious at what her son ha
d done. Still, both parents beamed at local reporters as a picture was snapped of Pat.22
On August 4, Mencken wrote Blanche of his relief when the Associated Press reported that Pat had been found. “I surely hope that your troubles are now over,” he wrote. “What a nuisance it has been!” Henry knew that Blanche constantly worried she was a poor mother, and for her benefit he recalled his cousin’s attempt to get him, when a boy, “to run out West and fight Indians with him.” Though he’d refused the offer, he recalled “six boys from his neighborhood alone doing something along those lines. Life to a boy in his teens is certainly not pleasant,” he added kindly, aware that Blanche believed she’d failed her son. “He is always policed, and most of the things he is asked to do are disagreeable to him.”23
Years later, Knopf’s accountant-turned-treasurer Joe Lesser said about the highly publicized event that “I think the story was a bunch of hooey Pat cooked up to be the center of attention, as always, and to avoid the issue of not getting into a college. I imagine he made sure his parents knew where he was the whole time.”24 After the Knopfs retrieved Pat, Alfred introduced him to people in the publishing world, and he ended up working in Doubleday’s stockroom for a year. It may have been at this time that Alfred started “procuring” women for both Pat and himself at Purchase, twice a week, according to Bill Koshland. Competition over Pat continued, and hiring women who “serviced” father and son (without Blanche’s knowledge) guaranteed that “the boy” would choose Purchase over Blanche’s New York apartment from now on. Blanche must have assumed that her son simply preferred living with his father.25
In September 1937, Blanche sailed to England on the Normandie, and returned having acquired Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Knopf published an especially fine slate of literature that year, including Clarence Day’s posthumous Life with Mother as well as André Gide’s repudiation of communism, Return from the U.S.S.R., along with the British writer Eric Ambler’s first export, Background to Danger, a spy novel. James M. Cain’s recently published Serenade was, Blanche and Henry believed, a masterpiece, less a mystery than a romance.26
As if it were a celebration of the year that had proceeded so badly with Pat’s escapade, Arthur and Nela Rubinstein (he to become one of Blanche’s occasional lovers, she to become one of Mildred Knopf’s friends) made the publisher’s voyage home on the Queen Mary all the more pleasurable. When she disembarked in New York on November 15, Blanche told Pat she would take him with her to Los Angeles over the Christmas holidays. This year they’d stay at the glamorous Beverly Wilshire Hotel, instead of at Edwin and Mildred Knopf’s house, as Blanche had done in the past. Knopf seemed to be entering a period of financial stability, though it was hardly flourishing. Its 1937 figures, as recorded by Joe Lesser, were sales of $645,000 (about $10.8 million today), profits of $10,657, and Alfred and Blanche’s combined salaries of $45,600 (Blanche’s $15,000). There was reason for optimism, of a financial sort at least.
15
SIGMUND FREUD, THOMAS MANN, AND OTHERS
ON MARCH 12, 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. Blanche realized that she needed to complete any lingering business abroad quickly and visit various authors, several of whom lay in harm’s way. The Anschluss had forced Sigmund Freud to immigrate to England before finishing his book Moses and Monotheism. Between his June relocation to London and his death the following year, Blanche would meet with him privately at least once and convince him to allow Knopf to translate and publish the book, his last completed work. His friend the writer Stefan Zweig, an acquaintance of Blanche’s—or possibly Thomas Mann, who was also close to Freud—had likely put the two in contact.1
Before she could travel abroad again, Blanche had two assignments for the early summer: ensuring Pat would be attending college, and providing at least rudimentary training to her new personal assistant, nineteen-year-old Ruth Levine (later Nasoff). Though she’d never anticipated it, Ruth, just out of secretarial school and the cousin of Joe Lesser’s wife, would stay for eight years, from 1938 to 1946, “loving it all.” As an elderly woman, she remembered her years with Blanche as the most exciting time of her life.2
Pat was a more difficult matter. Apparently, Alfred, who knew the Yale dean of admissions, had thoughtlessly urged Pat to apply to the Ivy League again. At least when he was rejected this time, their son didn’t overreact. After a fruitless trip to see the Woolseys, during which the judge disingenuously claimed to have no influence at Yale, Alfred finally accepted that Pat was not destined for a top university. The Knopfs then drove to Union College, a liberal-arts school in Schenectady, New York. Thanks to the president, whom Alfred knew from Columbia, and the Knopfs’ friend Frank Bailey, a trustee, in late June 1938 Pat was admitted to Union.
Before Blanche went abroad, the three Knopfs escaped New York’s summer heat by visiting Judith Anderson in Berkeley, as well as Edwin and Mildred in Santa Monica. They even saw the Heifetzes (Judith was said to be having an affair with Jascha) at their cottage in Balboa Island, California. Leaving Pat with his aunt and uncle (Mildred later confessed she had always found Pat a “mischief-maker”), Blanche and Alfred then traveled to the Grand Canyon, a setting that Blanche found rigid, cold, and without appeal.3 Blanche’s eyesight must have made the landscape particularly intimidating—she was having a harder time seeing than ever, her eyes receiving medical treatments that hurt more than helped her vision. Also, leaving Pat with Alfred’s brother preyed on her; she had sensed (and Mildred Knopf confirmed years later) that Edwin had a “vile temper and difficult nature.” Over the past few years, the more success Edwin had achieved, the more unbearable he became. Mildred’s friends told Blanche that he was pompous and “horrible” to his wife, whom most people thought “a saint.”4 Pat, however, considered him “the most wonderful Knopf in the family” (other than his father) and was pleased that his uncle so clearly emulated Alfred, down to his clothes.5 Mildred herself recalled how “Alfred was always dominant over Edwin.” At one of the inevitable dinner parties the Hollywood Knopfs gave when Alfred was in town, Edwin, imitating his brother’s lofty behavior, insisted they begin rather than wait half an hour for Marlene Dietrich, held up at the studio.6
Later in the month, Blanche took off for Europe. She planned to spend several days at Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish country estate, Bowen’s Court at Kildorrery, in County Cork, where, Bowen teased her, she would be forced to unwind. Blanche and Bowen had lots to talk about, and it was surely hard for anyone to imagine Blanche relaxing, even at Bowen’s Court. Before she left port she was already busy organizing an onboard cocktail party for the evening, gathering guests that included the author and rare book collector Wilmarth Lewis; Walter Damrosch, an American conductor and composer; and Arthur Krock, a Washington journalist whom she knew slightly. She hoped to invite one of Krock’s frequent sources, Joseph P. Kennedy, as well, no doubt to suggest he write a book. But the ambassador was impossible to reach. Remembering Blanche after her death, Lewis would say that she “was very hospitable and a little overwhelming.” He remembered publishing his first book with her in 1922, Tutor’s Lane. “To become a Knopf author was already like being asked to join a club,” he said.7
Blanche fell in love with Bowen’s country home, the “lush green surroundings” and its gentle hills similar to what delighted her about the Hudson Valley. She and Bowen opened themselves up to each other on this visit, causing Blanche to realize that though Bowen clearly loved her husband, the somewhat younger Alan Cameron, she was not in love with him. In fact, they had never consummated their marriage. But Bowen had had a thirty-year sexual liaison with a Canadian diplomat, who was also younger than she. Upon her return to New York, Blanche wrote Bowen, her words about the glorious landscape laden with meaning: “I never realized how beautiful living that way could possibly be.”8 She had, in fact, found mental repose in nature, though the opposite of the nature that inspired her husband.
Aware that this might be her last chance at luxury transatlantic travel for a long time, Blanche h
ad sailed back to the States on the palatial Île de France.9 The 1926 ocean liner with its four-story foyer was one of her favorite ships, primarily because of its three-decks-high swimming pools, and for the lavish Art Deco motif adorning the salle à manger, a design that would be re-created at Eaton’s, a ninth-floor restaurant in Quebec.
Though she would happily have stayed abroad for months, she had to be home in time for negotiations with Bennett Cerf. After consulting with others, she’d decided to encourage Dashiell Hammett to move to Random House, where he’d get more money—and she’d get rid of a major headache. Decades later, Cerf would recall Alfred warning him, “Go ahead, [take him,] you’ll have nothing but trouble with Hammett. He [is] a terrible man and I want nothing more to do with him.”10 Of course, it was Blanche who handled Hammett.
In October 1938, Blanche and Alfred visited the writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Norman Rockwell’s neighbor in Arlington, Vermont. Blanche knew Canfield slightly through her long friendship with Willa Cather, the two writers frequently exchanging rough drafts of their work. Alfred wanted to publish a book about Vermont and thought Blanche could convince Canfield to write one. While traveling, the Knopfs had just missed the fall hurricane that swept the Atlantic coast, hammering Long Island—and now the source of a great deal of conversation. Manhattan had escaped the worst of the storm, Blanche told Dorothy, though with 60-mile-per-hour winds in Central Park and 120 miles per hour recorded at the top of the Empire State Building, its residents didn’t get off scot-free either. Obviously, this was the time to get Canfield signed to Knopf, when she could write a timely book about her valiant state. Signs of the storm’s ravage surrounded them even as the two women conversed: they chatted in damaged Adirondack chairs as they gazed at the wreckage strewn over Canfield’s yard, Alfred shooting photographs of them talking.11
The Lady with the Borzoi Page 18
