The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  The women enjoyed each other. Dorothy, whose work as a Book-of-the-Month Club judge conferred its own cachet, talked about her efforts on behalf of Montessori, a school program whose focus on independent learning interested Blanche. Even more relevant to Blanche’s personal concerns was the Braille press Dorothy had established for blind World War I veterans. When she left, Blanche had no contract for a book on Vermont, but Canfield had agreed to do a children’s book, Tell Me a Story, published by Knopf in 1940.12

  Home from New England in time to vote for governor of New York, Blanche went to the Times offices with Alfred to hear the election returns on November 8: Tom and Frances Dewey were old friends. After insensitively informing Frances that he had voted for Herbert Lehman rather than for her husband, Alfred told Blanche they’d lost a friend. Blanche was exasperated: Why would he say such a thing? But all such concerns were overshadowed by the news coming from Europe. On November 9, at the command of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, mob violence broke out in Germany, Austria, and other Nazi-controlled areas. The police and spectators looked on as if at a carnival while synagogues and houses were broken into and some burned down, and shop windows were smashed. Thousands of Jewish men were rounded up and later sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht was the most extreme state-sanctioned violence against German and Austrian Jews yet.

  When Blanche traveled to Europe in late November, she went first to London to meet with the famous émigré now residing at Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. Freud, according to his biographer Ernest Jones, had already granted Knopf the rights for an English-language translation of his recently finished Moses and Monotheism, written in German. Though Freud had an advanced case of throat cancer, he continued working, even after the death of his beloved dog, always at his feet while he wrote. Having realized as he reread his German text that he’d omitted important material in the original, he could now remedy his mistake in the Knopf edition. Though Blanche knew that such alterations would hold up publication, she let the great doctor have his way. His changes were considerable, and he risked repetition while further developing his thesis. The translator Blanche hired, Katherine Jones, required a good deal of back-and-forth with the writer to shape the work for an English-speaking audience, though as Ernest Jones’s wife, she had a strong sense of the milieu of psychoanalysis as well as firsthand access to Freud.

  Blanche feared that Freud would die before they finished. She wanted him to view the final manuscript, to know his last written work was in good hands. She wrote him gently:

  Since all details of the translation are gone over by you with Dr. Jones I thought it most convenient that I [send] him my suggestions in order not to trouble you unduly.

  … You know how proud and happy I am to be privileged to publish your work; and I want it put in the hands of the public very soon. With the inevitable onrush of events your book becomes more important every day. I hope that we can achieve for you a scientific success and a popular one as well …

  With all kind regards and very good wishes to you in eufrichtiger Verehrung [“sincere admiration”—it should have been “aufrichtiger Verehrung”; Blanche’s secretary must have mistaken Blanche’s “a” for an “e”]—I am yours sincerely, Mrs. Alfred A. Knopf.13

  * * *

  Turning from Freud, Blanche worked on Raymond Chandler’s first detective novel, psychologically acute in its own right. In February 1939, Knopf’s winter sales were boosted by publication of The Big Sleep, which sold five thousand copies. Constructed from stories Chandler had published in The Black Cat, the novel was a fast-paced blend of murder and madness. Reviews were positive and critics looked forward to his future. The Nation admired “its subtle workmanship,” while The New Yorker liked its “story of degeneracy” that made “Dashiell Hammett look like Winnie the Pooh.” The New York Times pronounced it excellent “as a study of depravity.”

  More than eighty years later, Stephen King would lament in his book On Writing that Chandler was still vastly underrated in the twenty-first century, critics and other writers considering him “a hack … a hack with pretensions! The worst kind.” Those who read Chandler carefully, King said, tend to see him instead as an “important figure in twentieth-century American literature, an early voice describing the anomie of urban life in the years after World War II.”14 Blanche had counseled Chandler well, urging him to undertake the serious novels he wanted to write but to “keep the character of Marlowe—as you would anyway in all probability—but give him another name. In this way we think you would avoid leading casual readers to suspect they were getting another mystery whatever we said on the wrapper.”15

  Even as she was praising Chandler for the fine reviews of The Big Sleep, Blanche was impatient to see the early March press for Moses and Monotheism. She knew Freud had toiled to finish the book, even when respected Jewish scholars begged him not to release it at such an unstable time—fearing its radical revision of the Moses story might fuel anti-Semitism. He gently but firmly explained that he would not let the monsters triumph over his ability to write what he believed. If he did that, such forces of evil would have won.

  In May, far from Freud’s world, Blanche flew with Alfred to Hollywood, where they met Raymond Chandler in person for the first time and had lunch with him and his wife, Cissy. The couple was living in the mountains about two hours away, near Big Bear, where Chandler could escape the debilitating heat of Los Angeles. They all wanted to discuss the possibility of having The Big Sleep and its detective, Philip Marlowe, optioned for a film, but Blanche was focused on Chandler’s next book as well. To be titled Farewell, My Lovely (Blanche had refused Chandler’s half-teasing preference for Zounds, He Dies), the book would be made into a movie twice, first with the title Murder, My Sweet, with Marlowe played by Dick Powell, and later starring Robert Mitchum; in 1993, Elliott Gould did an audio recording of the book. Marlowe has proven an irresistible role for actors.

  * * *

  On June 1, 1939, Knopf released Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, one of her strongest novels, its themes of emotional distance and submerged heartbreak infused with a Jamesian melancholy. But some critics found the writing remote, resisting emotional engagement by the reader. Generally, however, reviews were positive, and the book’s original sales reached around five thousand, average for the novelist.

  Finally, while Freud was still alive to see it, Moses and Monotheism appeared. Predictably, opinions varied dramatically. For the most part, Blanche was pleased at the reviews, which in their radical diversity proved to her Freud’s courage. Some took the tack of near deification—The Commonweal declared it an “epoch making work” and The New Yorker declared that “his insights deriving from psychoanalysis are brilliant; his style, grave and scientific”—while others vilified it. The New York Times complained: “For one who professes such devotion to Science and Reason…, [Freud’s] procedure is shockingly unscientific and irrational,” and the Catholic World dismissed it entirely, calling the book “poorly written” and “spoiled by the author’s atheistic bias and his flimsy psycho-analytical fancies.”

  Blanche surely rushed a bound copy to Freud, telling him that the book was well received. A heavy cigar smoker, Freud had endured more than thirty operations until his friend Max Schur, honoring Freud’s request to help him kill himself, with Anna Freud’s reluctant permission, gave him lethal doses of morphine on September 21 and 22. On September 23, 1939, without a tremor, Freud died.

  At last, with Alfred in Europe, there was a lull in the office, enabling Blanche to fully train Ruth, on whom she would be depending heavily in the fall. Ruth Levine Nasoff, who never called Blanche by her first name, was “awed by her and everything she stood for.” The young assistant found Blanche “an intimidating but generous” employer, who, after traveling, always brought her a gift as if “to show her a gentle side.”

  In an interview given in her eighties, Nasoff became animated when talking about her former boss: “She had such energy … That�
�s one of the things I always admired about her. She stayed up all night dictating into a recorder. It seems to me she never slept.” When Ruth told Blanche that English was her best subject in school, her employer encouraged her to practice writing letters in Blanche’s “style of writing.” As soon as she saw that Ruth could “formulate a sentence properly,” she started dictating “distracted” letters, which she counted on Ruth to make “cohesive.” Unlike Alfred, whose writing was often too ponderous for readers to finish, Blanche had a clear, direct style that Ruth thought easy “to capture.”16 Often, when Blanche had a sudden idea, Ruth would take notes on matchstick books or a menu and from one or two words compose a letter, so intuitive had their working relationship become.

  Most days Blanche appeared at her office each morning around 9:00 “and [got] right to work, her desk always piled high.” Having spent much of the night awake, dictating letters from bed, Blanche would hand Ruth the wax cylinder (soon a more modern disc) and immediately turn to the sales reports: “She had to have [those] out in front of her every morning.” Much of Blanche’s day was spent “seeing people, really working meetings.” Late afternoons, she might go to her hairdresser’s, to tend to not only her hair but her nails as well. She already had her “long claws, dark purple and a nail guard for when she had a broken nail.”17 (After her death, Pete Lemay would remark, “I could find no suitable explanation for the fingernails … which curled at the tips like the claws of a jungle bird.” Unlike those employees from Knopf’s early days, Pete failed to associate the claws with the bird girl in Green Mansions.)18

  Blanche gave out hundreds of books for the December holidays, which Ruth wrapped and mailed, occasionally working out of Blanche’s “beautiful [white] apartment … The fabrics … Fireplace, terrace going around it, floor-to-ceiling sliding doors.”19 In contrast, at Purchase “you had to turn on [the] light on [the] second floor in broad daylight [because of all the] dark oak, doors stained dark. [Alfred] lived in darkness, she in light,” Ruth said.20 When Knopf was doing a children’s book on Christmas with Eleanor Roosevelt (to be published the following year, 1940, as Christmas: A Story), Ruth was startled to see both Alfred and Blanche race out of their offices to greet the First Lady first, until she realized the Knopfs needed to pit themselves against each other, so deeply ingrained was their competitive urge.

  For the next few months, after Alfred’s return from Europe, the Knopfs spent pleasant summer weekends with Carl and Carol Brandt, major New York literary agents with a grand country house near Clinton, New Jersey, just an hour from Manhattan but allowing guests to feel they were escaping the city. There were finally opportunities to relax: Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia, having fled their home in Germany, had been depending on Blanche for everything, it seemed, from stocking their refrigerator to using the telephone. Soon, however, they became acclimated to Princeton, where Blanche had helped Mann secure a short-term faculty position. Mann stayed at Princeton until 1942, when he and his family moved to Pacific Palisades, where the author eventually settled at 1550 San Remo Drive, an address he was assured was worthy of his eminence.

  She was pleased to receive a cable from William Shirer, who was now ready to write about the genesis of war he’d witnessed in Berlin—if Blanche could help him think of a way to frame his observations. She responded immediately, suggesting that he collate his notebook observations in Germany with his broadcasts from overseas. She concluded by assuring Shirer that she would draw up a contract soon, and that, in the end, she trusted him to inform her about how he would tell his story: “The book is there to be written and you have the stuff, and I want to publish it, so there we are.”21

  16

  A MAN OF HER OWN

  THE DECEMBER HOLIDAYS OF 1939 held a new poignancy, with Blanche deeply apprehensive about Pat’s eagerness to go to war. “There is not going to be any war in Europe this year,” Roosevelt had insisted, only to be preempted on September 1 by the German invasion of Poland.1 Determined to celebrate this Christmas Day as a family, Blanche asked the Van Vechtens to join her, Alfred, and Pat in Purchase, with both couples meeting again the following week at the Pforzheimers’ New Year’s Eve party.

  Shortly after midnight Blanche and Alfred “sneaked away” to their car, parked on a side street, and drove for an hour to the Heifetzes’ “Potato Farm” near Ridgefield, Connecticut.2 As on every January 1 (though usually at the Heifetzes’ Park Avenue apartment), there was an abundance of chamber music and a lavish predawn breakfast. Still in evening clothes, Alfred drove Blanche to the White Plains station, where she caught a train back to the city to prepare for her customary eggnog party later that day at her apartment. Preoccupied with fear of another war, everyone—the Manns, Rubinsteins, and Heifetzes—dipped with unusual abandon into Blanche’s heavily spiked drink, which was stronger than ever, guests noted.3

  Four weeks into 1940, Blanche was the focus of a Publishers Weekly feature titled “Knopf Marks Anniversary with Big List.” Explaining that though “last year [Blanche] went to the Pacific Coast” (referring to her trip to California and the Northwest), until “recently,” Knopf business had required that she go to Europe. Her readers were told, “She is active in every branch of the business.” While pleased by the publicity, Blanche had hoped the journalist would discuss her excitement over the long-anticipated two-volume Shelley biography by Newman Ivey White, published in 1940 and still highly regarded today.

  * * *

  Two earlier books by White, a southern gentleman, had further educated Blanche in the culture Van Vechten had first shown her: An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes in 1924, and American Negro Folk Songs four years later. Over the years, the Whites and the Knopfs, along with the publishers’ neighbor the philanthropist and book collector Carl Pforzheimer, had become close. In his Shelley biography, White acknowledged Pforzheimer for letting him use a journal belonging to Claire Clairmont, no small favor: Clairmont, the stepsister of the writer Mary Shelley, was also Lord Byron’s lover and the mother of his daughter Allegra. The collector had long amassed material on the British Romantics, storing it at his Purchase home. (By 1986, with the cooperation of Carl Pforzheimer’s son, the New York Public Library would become one of the world’s leading repositories for the study of English Romanticism.)4

  That spring of 1940, White and Pforzheimer attended a small party that Blanche gave at Purchase in honor of the Chicago-born couturier Mainbocher, a recent émigré from Paris, where he had established the first American atelier in the city. He and his lover spent the weekend of May 17 with Blanche, and when they heard of the fall of France, “it was as if their closest friend had died.”5

  The party, which included Thomas Mann, Mencken, and a clutch of fashionable socialites who clearly could afford expensive clothes, was one of the very eclectic mixes that only Blanche could pull off. She intended to show the designer that even the backwaters outside New York City provided plenty of well-known, international figures to whom he could ply his craft; imagine what Manhattan itself would offer his business. Just a year earlier, Mainbocher had been immortalized by his farewell to Paris, an elaborate corset that was a highlight of his last French collection. Horst (whose full name was Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann) captured the garment in one of his most famous photographs, known today as The Mainbocher Corset, a shot of a highly constructed item that redefined the drab fashion of the decade. The corset, listed in Town & Country as one of the major events of 1939, had caused a furor in France, according to Vanity Fair, especially when the designer announced he was exchanging Paris for New York City.6

  That summer, Blanche was pleased to resume her relationship with Serge Koussevitzky, who regaled her with news about the talent he had assembled at Tanglewood, which would become the Boston Symphony’s summer home. Koussevitzky’s friend Aaron Copland had introduced the maestro to a young man who wanted to take the master conducting class, and from the moment that Koussevitzky had seen Leonard Bernstein—even before watching him work—he was sure th
e musician was preternaturally gifted. The master didn’t have to teach “Lenny” much technique, so he became a kind of father figure instead, encouraging Bernstein to “let it all out” on the podium. At some point Copland would introduce Van Vechten to the “boy” who was “the Maestro’s favorite pupil,” and Van Vechten reported to Blanche: Bernstein wore a pair of sparkling cuff links, his gift from Koussevitzky, at every concert he conducted.7

  When the Tanglewood season was over, Blanche went to Los Angeles. Many of her authors, she realized, found it easier to see her on the West Coast than in New York. From Raymond Chandler, to Conrad Richter, to Arthur and Nela Rubinstein, who were living in Brentwood during the war, while the Manns were settled in Pacific Palisades—many of Blanche’s friends and writers had gone west. Edwin and Mildred had decided to buy in Hollywood, where they, Blanche, and her authors often lunched at the Brown Derby, opposite the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Mildred would later recall Blanche wondering aloud, as she had with Florence Heifetz, how Mildred managed it all: to be such a great mother, superb cook, and attentive wife, while she herself had failed at all three. Mildred disagreed, reminding Blanche of all she’d achieved. But Blanche demurred, and in an oddly defeated voice told her, “No, I could never have accomplished what you have.”8