On December 10, Blanche would write Ben Robertson, briefly home in South Carolina: “Despite the fact that we are at war, I think you should go right ahead with your book on the South just as you are doing. I agree with you that we should tell the country what the South could contribute to its future and I certainly wouldn’t let anything deflect me now. I am delighted that you are nearly [done] and do please keep right on your way.” She added a P.S.: he should send her his cable bill to pay.8
* * *
In January 1942, Pat’s military training in Alabama was finished. Blanche had visited her son frequently at Maxwell Field, a training facility for pilots. At some point during this period she broached the subject of her and Alfred divorcing. As usual, there are various versions of the story. In the early nineties, when his father was dead, Pat shared a letter that he wrote his parents the day after Christmas, 1941: “I hope you two won’t do anything rash. I know that at this stage of the game, such a move would hardly be rash. I think you’re both too swell to have anything like such a move spoil a lifetime of happiness and success.”9 Other accounts have Pat, outraged, shouting, No, you can’t do that! In yet another rendering, Pat remembered: “[Alfred] was willing to say yes—but then she’d be out of the publishing world for good and he’d ensure she never got a job elsewhere.” Fiercely loyal to his father, Pat believed Alfred “loved [Blanche] and never would have given her a divorce anyway.”10 Upon hearing this version, Bill Koshland told Susan Sheehan that Pat’s account of his father’s determination to hold on to Blanche was surely the most accurate: “Alfred was always in love with her,” Koshland stressed, “[and] he loved her much more than she loved him.”11
The crisis passed, and when Pat earned his wings, both his parents attended the graduation ceremony together at the Southeast Air Corps Training Center in Montgomery, the “only time” Pat remembered Alfred being visibly proud of him.12 Getting his wings allowed Pat to stop fearing his father; he would say, “I never grew up until I got my wings.”13 Over the next two to three years, Pat performed bravely with Britain’s 446th Bomb Group, Eighth Air Force. Stationed in Bungay, a market town on the Suffolk Coast of England, he was deployed to a strategic site: the seaboard had few cliffs and was an ideal location from which the enemy could invade. He was ultimately awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, rising to the rank of captain and flying tactical bombing missions over Munich, Koblenz, and Hamburg—all places his parents had visited in what must have seemed a different world. In 1942, the year he should have graduated, Pat won Union College’s Frank Bailey Cup, donated by his family’s friend for that member of the senior class “who has rendered the greatest service to the College in any field.” He received his diploma in 1945. (As a courtesy he is listed with the Class of ’42.)14 Pat “went to war knowing I’d never come back [and so] I gave away my things.” He would later say that his stint in the army was the best time of his life.15
Blanche focused her attention on organizing her first trip to South America, where she had decided to go in place of Europe that year. Though she had been appointed to U.S. Director of Civil Defense Fiorello La Guardia’s Women in Literature Committee (with Lillian Hellman and Fannie Hurst), she was eager to do something more active, since the committee seemed moribund from its inception.16 From the stories Mildred recounted to her sister-in-law, she was far more engaged in war work than Blanche’s group. Mildred’s organization of women was spearheaded by Mrs. Louis B. Mayer to tend to the social needs of returning servicemen. The Santa Monica project created a canteen where more than a thousand volunteers served drinks and provided entertainment—movies, books, and appearances by actors and comedians—for the soldiers. The assemblage voted Mildred their president.
FDR’s undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles, then proposed Blanche as an unofficial envoy to South America on behalf of the State Department. (Welles knew Blanche through her acquaintance with his wife, Mathilde, and from Knopf’s attempt to sign Welles’s book, The Time for Decision.) For years the United States had been sponsoring a “good neighbors” program. Aware of rumors that some South American countries might befriend the Axis powers, President Roosevelt wanted to reinvigorate the program, and Welles was carrying out his mandate. Now, with Blanche soon to visit a continent entirely foreign to her, she’d been trying to learn rudimentary Portuguese and Spanish, though she’d be accompanied by interpreters throughout her travels.
The amount of red tape it took even for highly placed officials to arrange such a trip was daunting. Meanwhile, Blanche remembered it was time for her yearly eye exam in Baltimore, so she slipped in a short stay at the Belvedere, where she dined with Mencken. The ophthalmologist who treated them both said her eyes were, as expected, somewhat worse than last year, but not in need of further surgery. Interested in discussing her son more than her deteriorating sight (though Mencken always enjoyed talking about illness), Blanche fretted that Pat, still in the army, showed little interest in joining the firm after he was discharged and finished college. Mencken was unclear whether Blanche was actually disappointed or relieved.17
On the train back to Manhattan, she decided to throw a dinner party for two of her current favorite authors, William Shirer and Paul Gallico. The menu was different from the heavy fare Alfred served when he alone was responsible:
4th April 1942
BROILED SHRIMPS
STEINBERGER
AUSLESE 1921
KABINETT WEIN
ROAST TURKEY
PEAS AND CARROTS
LEOVILLE POYFERRE 1870
SALAD
PINEAPPLE ICE AND CAKE
CHATEAU D’YQUEM 1921
RESERVE PERSONNELLE DE
M LE MARQUIS DE LUR SALUCES
COFFEE.18
In June, the impatient publisher finally received notice that her trip had been approved by the necessary channels. Blanche’s flight on the Douglas C-54 depended, like all aviation of the day, upon the navigator reading land cues as well as using “dead reckoning.” This method, essentially a means of calculating one’s current position by using a previously determined point, or “fix,” and advancing based upon known or estimated speeds, is prone to cumulative errors and rarely in use today. Blanche was flying much as Charles Lindbergh had in 1927, his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis equipped with crude instruments and its pilot dependent on dead reckoning most of the trip.
The earplugs handed out to passengers helped to blunt the engine noise. And having her lover at her side surely eased Blanche’s journey: inexplicably, Hubert Hohe was given clearance to take the trip as well. Over the next six weeks (June to August 1942), Blanche would travel more than sixteen thousand miles, almost entirely by air (including the occasional seaplane), flying to Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil—scouring the continent for authors in search of a publisher.
“The chief impression” she gained was “one of newness, of aliveness … people who found joy and excitement … and a great hope for the future.” In an account she later wrote, Blanche also remarked on the “stratification of classes and the impact on the writers” who therefore “turn to Europe rather than their own countries.”19 She was particularly enamored of a local friend of Virginia Woolf, Victoria Ocampo, an Argentinian woman “of very great charm and ability, and a brilliant writer.” Blanche signed at least five new writers on this trip (for whom she immediately sought first-rate translators), including authors still read today.20 She didn’t care about the genre as much as overall literary quality. Yet the trip was motivated by wartime politics more than she would divulge to anyone but Mencken. Sumner Welles had asked her to be his eyes and ears, and, as always, she was thorough.
Met in Lima by “a Peruvian Indian, who stuck by [her] during the stay,” she found the silent “ghost” a bit shady. She had little time to worry: Peru had no publishers, and whenever Blanche opened her door “there was a line of writers, of varying kinds, essayists, poets, etc. waiting the whole length of the corridor; no knowledge of w
hat language we publish in, merely the fact that we publish important to them.” The “Indian,” leaving Blanche unsure which side he was on, warned her that it was dangerous to be in the region because local Germans “had records of all the anti-Nazi publicity.” Blanche learned that “the embassy was aware of my danger [and the Indian asked] was I aware of it? I was, I told him, but if he or anyone liquidated me then, the books would go on anyway.”21
She continued on to Santiago, where her hotel was German “and full of spies,” so she packed up and went to another. After a large luncheon—“senators, govt officials, about 50”—she flew nine hours over the Andes, finally arriving in Buenos Aires. “Here, too, I was met by writers with manuscripts—people I had never heard of. Met old friend, Arnaldo Cortesi of Times, stayed at Plaza one of the really charming hotels in the world.” That night, Blanche dined at one of the best steak houses in Argentina. Eager to be a gracious guest, she answered that yes, the hors d’oeuvres looked delicious. “I was unaware until the course came that [everything] consisted of all the horrible insides of the animal. I refused to eat and almost had to leave the table. This was the great pièce de résistance of the Argentines; I was so embarrassed.”
When she discovered that the country’s major newspaper, La Prensa, was allowed only a small paper ration because of its pro–North American and anti-Nazi views, she arranged to see the mayor of Buenos Aires: “I had to go and listen to a diatribe against North America losing the war and the Argentines going along with the Germans because of this. ‘You win a battle and we might think of coming along with you’ the man said.” (Blessedly, she was assured at her next stop, in Montevideo, that there were no Nazis in Uruguay.) She was given the “usual ambassador’s lunch” but planned not to eat anything raw, since she’d been told before she left home to stick to the cooked food. Eating some watercress soup, she “suddenly remembered and couldn’t decide between manners and typhoid.” She spit it out, “sitting at the right of the ambassador.” Thankfully, after dinner she shone, as she was urged to speak French, rather than use a translator for Spanish. “Without any other Americans around [the Argentinians] spoke very freely of their country, of the war, of culture, and I got a great deal of information,” she said in her report home.
In addition to acting as a cultural attaché, she was asked by Sumner Welles to “do favors” for United States consulates, including sending updates to the American government. German sympathizers in Brazil were about to launch a coup. “This was being put down gently,” Blanche wrote to Washington, “which I was enabled to see at close quarters by official Brazilians and the Secret Service officers.” Pro-Nazis were all around, one of whom, like the Indian in Peru, was clearly assigned as her “tail” the entire time she was abroad. She finally confronted the Brazilian ambassador, who, as the Indian had, essentially told her she was on the wrong side of the war. At lunch in São Paulo, she was introduced to American Secret Service agents sitting to her left, who were there to monitor the uprising, with an officer on her right explaining that he rode in an armored car with a wrestler sitting beside him. Apparently, Germany had put a price on his head, and several Brazilian Germans were eager to collect the reward.
Local Brazilian officials asked Blanche to take back some “politically explosive” papers to the States, and, reluctantly, she agreed. “They were planning [their own] political coup in the autumn, had no leader, wanted help from us. It certainly had to be then or later so I took the documents … in my briefcase.” En route to Miami from Trinidad, she received more attention than she had expected. Two months earlier Clare Boothe had visited the country, the only female to precede Blanche on a Good Neighbor trip, and once Boothe’s importance was recognized, Brazilian Customs had been told to “give the works to any woman coming through.” They held Blanche’s briefcase till midnight, as they would with any potential spy.
In Miami, Blanche turned over the satchel to U.S. Customs, with instructions to deliver it to Undersecretary of State Welles in Washington. Then she herself stopped in D.C. to be debriefed by Welles. The war would prove a turning point in Blanche’s life, a time when she realized she could make it on her own. Her strength, apparent to others for decades, finally felt real to her. And as always, she was most excited about the literature she was bringing to her country: she’d gotten a novel by the Brazilian Jorge Amado, his work eventually translated into nearly fifty languages. She was further gratified when she signed the controversial cultural anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, whose three-volume critique of twentieth-century “multiculturalism” by means of his social history of Brazil’s racial and economic development remains a bible for American graduate students.
Both men would be published by Knopf in 1946. Blanche teased Mencken upon her return, ribbing him for saying she’d find no masterpieces in South America.22
* * *
Back in New York with Hubert Hohe, Blanche inspected an apartment renovation at 24 West Fifty-Fifth Street that she’d had Ruth supervise while she was away. She’d hired a contractor to break through her walk-in closet, enabling her to access the apartment next door, which they had bought, linking the two condos through a secret passage undetectable from the outside. Her assistant used the connection “all the time … No one who went into Blanche’s apartment would ever know [about his].”23 Until now, Blanche’s lover had rented an apartment in the East Sixties, which he probably still shared with his wife—from whom he would be divorced in Reno six months later, in January 1943.
Ruth believed her boss to be a liberated woman with a queenly freedom to have others scurry at her every word: “I used to get her paycheck each week and deposit it in her checking account. I took care of all her bills. When she went out, her purse had nothing in it. Her money—I would take a certain amount of cash from her paycheck each week—she had a money clip. Each had to be folded individually; she had nice new bills. I put them in her purse when she went out. She never counted them; she had to trust me completely. Nothing else, maybe a lipstick in her purse.” And always, the ubiquitous cigarette lighter; she was an incessant smoker. Daily, “when Blanche went out to lunch, I’d have to go into her office and stop the fire that was in her wastebasket. She couldn’t see and she was a chain smoker,” Ruth recalled. “Demanding, that’s the word”—seeming to need no sleep.24
Meanwhile, Alfred was starting to feel isolated in Purchase, complaining to Mencken that he had few visitors because dinner guests required a car to get to his “deserted home.”25 There were exceptions: from an account that Thomas Mann gave of Thanksgiving 1942, it seems that Blanche invited several South American diplomats to a traditional turkey dinner at Purchase. A few of the guests asked Mann to read, so he spent an hour reciting “relatively ‘surefire’ passages from the work [he was currently] struggling with,” the last of the “Joseph story” tetralogy.26 Joseph and His Brothers was a four-part novel retelling the story of Genesis from Jacob to Joseph, written over the course of sixteen years.
In early January, to Blanche’s great relief, Hubert Hohe showed her the divorce decree that had finally arrived from Reno, Nevada, for him and his wife, Sonja S. Hohe.27 Blanche and her beau celebrated by going to the Stork Club on East Fifty-Third Street, just east of Fifth Avenue, where the rich and famous who inhabited the nightclub showed little awareness of the war. At the end of the month, the Knopfs showed up together to give a luncheon at the St. Regis in honor of their production head, Sidney Jacobs, for his fifteen years of service to the firm. The publishers used the occasion to announce a pension fund they were setting up for their forty-five employees: their finances were beginning to reflect those of an established house.
Walter Benton’s This Is My Beloved was another surprise success, almost at the level of The Prophet. Timed for Valentine’s Day 1943, the collection of fairly explicit love poems was written by a returning veteran. The poetry, centered on a mystery girl, Lillian, proved especially popular with soldiers still far from home.28 Too bold for other firms, the manuscript w
as sent to Knopf by a poetry editor at Scribner’s, who thought Blanche and Alfred should take a look. Blanche believed the book might be commercially popular, but first she had several well-respected poets and critics, including Louis Untermeyer, Van Wyck Brooks, and John Crowe Ransom, read it and agree to write blurbs. After its Valentine’s Day launch, This Is My Beloved was never advertised again. According to Joe Lesser, “it sold by word of mouth. Sold because sweethearts read it; we launched it very quietly, with great dignity, never tried to appeal to those looking for a thrill.” The slim two-dollar book averaged more than two thousand copies a month.29 Over the next twenty-five years it reached the six hundred thousand mark, remarkable sales for any book of poems. Privately, Blanche told Mencken that she found This Is My Beloved more provocative than the much-lauded sensual poetry she had read in South America.
Benton’s poetry eventually became the backbone of much of the singer/songwriter/poet Rod McKuen’s music. Various recorded versions kept appearing, including one in 1962 that was Blanche’s favorite, the jazz flautist Herbie Mann accompanying the actor Laurence Harvey.
Book sales in general were soaring in those days. Scarce goods might not be found on the shelves, but the market for books was robust. In 1943, there were more than 250 million books published, versus roughly 111 million in 1933. When the book clubs were started in 1926, they had sold an average of a half million books a year; by 1946, the Book-of-the-Month Club alone, not including the Armed Services Editions, would sell three million.30
That spring, since the focus of the enemy seemed to have shifted from England to the Continent, Blanche was again maneuvering for a ticket to London. Sadly, this time she had less assistance. On February 22, 1943, Ben Robertson, who had been assigned to head the Herald Tribune’s British bureau, boarded the Yankee Clipper, a seaplane. On its approach to Lisbon’s airport, as the pilot was descending, the plane’s left wingtip hit the water and crashed into the Tagus River. The failed landing killed twenty-four of the thirty-nine passengers, including Robertson.
The Lady with the Borzoi Page 21
