The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  Through other contacts, Blanche had wrangled an army transport ticket to London. Now there was the military’s interminable “hurry up and wait.” Mencken took her mind off the delays—and Robertson’s death—when he came to town to discuss marketing strategies for sales of Happy Days, which looked strong at 10,953 orders. The third segment of three autobiographical accounts of his life, Happy Days was selling better than the earlier two in part due to the war, with the navy purchasing books for their ships and stations.

  In July, while she was waiting to be processed, Blanche and Hohe went out to East Hampton, which was not too far from Montauk, on the tip of Long Island, where Knopf’s Bill Koshland had a few days’ leave before going overseas. Koshland remembered how “Blanche had a cocktail party for me at the Sea Spray hotel and restaurant [the area’s most elegant accommodation]. Hohe was with her then and I met him for the first time. [He wasn’t] particularly handsome and he had a receding hairline and was younger than Blanche,” but, added Koshland, “you would know that this was a European gentleman.”31

  Blanche returned from the beach the following month to have lunch with Mencken on August 8 at ‘21.’ That night, which was unbearably hot, Alfred served his friend his usual heavy dinner, pork and sauerkraut.32 The two men practiced Schubert’s Rosamunde ballet as a piano duet, the music causing Alfred to retract his earlier statement about being lonely, having decided that he “really liked” his solitary life at Purchase. These days he even found the tremendous upkeep it required gratifying and good for his health.33

  This was a time of particular tension between the Knopfs, Hubert Hohe clearly the elephant in the room. The publicist Frances Lindley remembered how she had never seen such fraught office meetings. “I wanted to die,” Lindley remembered. “[The Knopfs would] be shouting or Alfred would turn to Joe Lesser and say something absolutely … I couldn’t believe that a human being would speak to another human being like that.”34

  The Knopf staff sat around the table like poltroons, unwilling to risk a word in Blanche’s defense, while Lesser developed ulcers and began walking out of the meetings. “Alfred and Blanche would go at each other and at subordinates about the design of a [book] jacket. Alfred was worse than Blanche; her sense of her own image kept her from starting it. Alfred would lash and lash and lash until she’d finally take the bait. You wanted to escape that moment.”35

  Unlike at his office, where Alfred seemed determined to prove himself the sovereign, at Purchase, with or without Mencken, he was on his best behavior, feeling no challenge to his authority. Purchase, in contrast, was where Blanche tended to retaliate against Alfred’s untoward behavior at work. While guests waited to see if Alfred deemed them worthy of his finest wine, Blanche often came late to the table. Though never an alcoholic, she would make a show of walking down the stairs with “the biggest glass of bourbon” anyone had seen, “no apologies, no nothing,” Bill Koshland remembered. Free to release the temperament she usually contained at Knopf meetings, Blanche would act as “an absolute hellcat” at the dreaded Sunday brunches where top staff or close friends were the usual guests.36

  * * *

  After getting clearance from Washington—with the stipulation that she wear an official army uniform in case of enemy capture—finally, on October 3, 1943, Blanche took a car service to the gorgeous Art Deco clipper terminal near what is today’s LaGuardia Airport and flew to London via a C-47 military transport. Her companion was a hearty Texan, J. Frank Dobie, on his way to Cambridge as visiting professor of American literature. Blanche would take precise notes during the trip: “Dobie, Stetson hat, weather-beaten, insisted on fishing when the plane was forced to land in Gander, Newfoundland, because of the dark. We caught smelts. We had to walk back with the smelts. Walked down a long corridor at the inn where we had to stay. You travel with your handbag, a little zipper case, for all but your big things: me, a pair of moles [fur slippers] and a pajama top.”37

  The temporarily appointed Lieutenant Colonel Blanche Knopf had flown to England via Newfoundland and Ireland, and at one of those stops, when told she couldn’t take a bath—“H2O restricted for drinking”—she traded her food rations for water. She didn’t eat much anyway, she assured the soldiers. Her bags were “chiefly full of concentrated foods, nylons and lipsticks to give [to friends], very few clothes except to give away.”38 Mencken wrote her that he hoped she was “comfortable” and “finding a lot of good books. If you encounter any of my old friends, please tell them that I pray for them regularly. If you feel like it, send me a picture postcard showing Westminster Abbey, the Cheshire Cheese, or some other such point of interest.”39 On October 17, the Syracuse Herald-Journal announced Blanche’s travel, declaring that “there have been few other American publishers [daring] to make the journey.”

  In London, she settled into the Ritz as usual. (She would later comment how reassured she’d been to learn that de Gaulle, Churchill, and finally Eisenhower held summit meetings there.) She gave a small party to toast James “Scotty” Reston, back in London after time at home on sick leave, and his book Prelude to Victory, published in 1942 by Knopf. Viking had offered Reston a thousand dollars, but Knopf bid more—surely at Blanche’s insistence. As the Washington correspondent for The New York Times, Scotty was known for his integrity. According to his biographer John Stacks, Blanche had personally edited every page of Prelude to Victory, a favor Reston requested and Blanche was happy to oblige.40 Ed Murrow, whom Blanche was pursuing for Knopf, had provided a quote—whether out of fondness for Blanche or for the author’s work is unclear: “I know of no newspaper man who has more intelligence and integrity than James Reston and everything he writes shows these qualities.”41

  Blanche was deeply impressed by Scotty’s loyalty to others, constancy being one of the virtues she most valued. The reporter had recently refused to share “dirt” on Undersecretary Welles, who was now being hounded by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, jealous of Welles’s friendship with FDR. In response to Reston’s coldness, Hull brought to (the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter) Arthur Krock his own files detailing Welles’s homosexual relationships, but Krock also scuttled the gossip, even with the hard evidence and photographs that Hull showed him.42 Blanche was proud to call both newspapermen her friends.43 Her only disappointment during her 1943 London trip was that she “lost Mr. Sumner Welles’ book because nobody in New York did anything about it. I would have done better staying here [in New York] and getting it.” Even so, she admitted, “I did get a lot of other books.”44

  As always, Blanche went to the source to get those books. While dining with the reporters at the hotel, she started asking Murrow to let her publish his radio reports, which he was currently sending regularly to the United States through CBS feeds. She would work on Murrow, according to his wife, Janet, for the next twenty-two years, until his death in 1965, just as he was finally compiling his collection for Knopf. It was Janet who finished the project, turning over the classic broadcasts to Blanche. They became Knopf’s In Search of Light, which Murrow’s widow dedicated to “Blanche with love and appreciation.”45

  18

  THE WAR’S END

  AT AN AFTERNOON BUFFET LUNCH at Manhattan’s Dorset Hotel in early November 1943, Blanche shared stories with Mencken of her brief trip overseas. The newspaperman, rarely jealous, turned up his nose at what he considered the flashy tactics of the war journalists, writing about their own exploits instead of focusing on the soldiers. Sensing his envy, Blanche quickly turned to the reason for the day’s event: guests were celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Joe Lesser as a Knopf employee. Lesser, by now the company’s treasurer and a board member, was feted by forty-two well-wishers, mostly fellow employees, and with Blanche and Alfred seated at the same table. Though the Knopfs had agreed with their board on the unusually generous gift of a five-week winter trip to the destination of their choice for Lesser and his wife, no one gave a speech or even offered a toast. Alfred asked Mencken to announce the gift, and Menc
k’s brief tribute focused on Mrs. Lesser appearing “so proud” of her husband—possibly a jab at Blanche for the neglect with which she’d been treating her spouse of late in favor of Hohe.

  Having come to the firm as a clerk, Lesser was now one of its key officers. Though the Knopfs still brought in two-thirds of the books, Lesser was the only employee who could sign contracts. At least the company had developed a practical if demanding method to track their publications. After an author delivered the finished manuscript, whoever had been conducting the negotiations conferred with those in sales, advertising, and production, after which a five-by-seven-inch pink slip of paper was clipped to a card for estimates of advance sales, “sales during the first six months, sales after six months, college sales, advertising appropriations, and print orders.” There was also a space for comments on “General” as well as “Special” markets, meant for media, publicity, and advertising-copy suggestions. Months before publication, and after the card had been circulated for comments, it was “batted around at weekly business meetings.” One year after a particular book was published, the original estimated sales were compared with the results. According to Alfred, the cards “enabled Mr. Lesser to make a reasonably accurate forecast of the firm’s profits a year in advance.”1

  Blanche especially wished Joe well: despite his typically fair-minded approach to both Knopfs, when the going got really rough, she felt she could trust him to take her side. She had urged Alfred to approve the gift, especially in light of the company’s recently released financial report for the second half of the fiscal year—and in light of her expectations for the forthcoming fiction A Bell for Adano. Knopf was doing well these days, the budget analysis “very satisfactory,” according to Mencken. The net profit for six months was $40,000, after federal taxes of $63,000, with the current assets of the company $501,000 and its liabilities $245,000.2

  Now Blanche fixed her attention upon the journalist John Hersey’s first novel: she considered A Bell for Adano an important book, and she was right. When it appeared in February 1944, it was immediately popular, the following year winning the Pulitzer Prize and soon becoming the basis for Paul Osborn’s play by the same name starring Fredric March and then a movie with Gene Tierney. The novel takes place during World War II in a Sicilian coastal town; Fascists have melted down the church bell in the center of Adano to make munitions to be used against the Allies. A sympathetic Italian-American officer, Major Victor Joppolo (based on the real-life Major Frank E. Toscani), becomes the village’s military governor, and when he learns that the townspeople’s dearest wish is for the bell’s return, he somehow obtains a substitute from a navy destroyer.

  Though A Bell for Adano sold 170,500 copies, Hersey would take to heart Diana Trilling’s criticism of what she found sentimental in an otherwise impressive novel.3 The author’s direct style alongside his eye for detail impressed Trilling and most other readers, though critics suggested that his fiction bore too many marks of his life as a journalist rather than the novelist he was trying to become.

  * * *

  In spite of Knopf’s current financial health, its revenues steadily increasing, whenever Mencken was around Blanche these days he seemed unusually grouchy, even negative. It must have been difficult for him to ignore the obvious subject of her lover; he had always appreciated Blanche’s keeping her love life private, and her current carelessness surely rankled him. Yet Mencken never mentioned Hubert Hohe’s name or presence in his diary or journals. Hohe is rendered invisible.

  It wasn’t until April 1944 that Mencken even made it to Blanche’s “new” apartment at 24 West Fifty-Fifth Street, which had been renovated a year and a half earlier. Pat’s memory suggested a better-looking venue than Mencken recorded: “There was a coat closet on the left and a very small kitchen door to the right, no windows. As you went out the kitchen door you went into a circular area with windows over a street where she had a circular dining room, attached to the living room. Open, no door. You walk into the apartment past the kitchen and on the right is a very large living room with a big Dubuffet [added later] hanging on the wall” (a defiant nod at the 1913 Armory Show she had admired, against Alfred’s instruction).4 Blanche had an affinity for the aesthetics of so-called low art, abandoning traditional beauty in favor of what she believed a more humanistic approach to making images.

  Mencken had become increasingly irritated as he and Blanche waited an hour on a Sunday night for a table at Voisin before getting to Blanche’s apartment. Back at his hotel at the end of the evening, he wrote in his diary that “the house is a new building in the ultra-modernist manner … The apartment is done in white and pale shades of gray, with here and there a touch of metallic copper. The effect is appalling, and [Blanche] says that it is almost impossible to keep the place clean. It is smaller than her last apartment on 54th street, but costs $2500 a year [more]. Its only attraction is a roof-garden about as big as a dining-room table.” Continuing to find fault with the “new” place, he called the modernist prints on the wall “ghastly” and said the furniture was “fit only for a boudoir.”5

  After his tour of the apartment, Mencken had settled down with Blanche for some “gabble,” which went in an unpleasant direction. He was “offended,” he told her, “by the little book of prayers” for soldiers that Knopf had just released. He thought the company had “disgraced its list and damaged its trade-mark” by publishing prayers written by Generals Eisenhower and Patton—the latter a hero who was lately in the newspapers for “cuffing a wounded soldier.” Mencken railed on, declaring such trash to have “undone the work of years, and left the house imprint ridiculous.”

  Just as bad, he continued, were the “preposterous books by war correspondents and other fakers.” Blanche had defended Scotty Reston’s Prelude to Victory and other Knopf books about the war on the grounds that they sold well while serving the country, promoting dialogue among its citizens. Mencken insisted, however, that such books “sold the firm down the river.”Blanche avoided stating the obvious: her friend no longer knew the leading war correspondents. In spite of his populism, Mencken was losing touch with the culture; even the GI Bill enacted that year didn’t entirely please him.

  Early that summer, Blanche and Hohe would go to Whiteface Mountain Inn at Lake Placid, New York. She thought it would be good for them to get away from Knopf for a while, even if she had to take work with her. Ruth made all the arrangements, but their vacation was cut short.6 Blanche’s eyesight was deteriorating rapidly, now causing not only loss of vision but sharp pain as well. In Baltimore, her ophthalmologist prescribed a newly released eyedrop for glaucoma, which was her current diagnosis. She was back home in time for the liberation of Paris on August 25, which she celebrated in her apartment with the writer MacKinlay Kantor, his sister, and a friend. The women fell asleep early on the couch while Blanche and her notoriously womanizing guest drank champagne late into the night.7 There was no sign of Hohe.

  Alfred and Mencken were at Purchase, which seemed gloomier each time the journalist visited. He increasingly disliked going to the country, where he sat “swathed in darkness,” and where Alfred felt obliged to discuss his prostate problems. In his diary, Mencken assaulted Alfred’s “incompetent doctors,” one of whom “massaged him violently and as a result he became very uncomfortable.” Upon seeing a urologist, who could find “no sign whatsoever of infection,” Alfred started feeling better—as if what he had really needed was attention.8

  The next evening the two men returned to Purchase, planning to relax after a tiring day. Instead, they were greeted by the butler, who “rushed out with the news that the Swedish cook had fallen down the steps.” Alfred recalled, “When we got to the kitchen we found her propped up with one ankle swollen and still swelling. The poor woman was somewhat shaken up and so she was put to bed in the hospital.” The house seemed to confer a curse upon Knopf’s servants, Mencken decided. A year or so earlier the gardener had somehow “blown up the heating plant in the garage and was so
badly injured that he was in the hospital for eight or nine months. Soon afterward the butler, a sad Alsatian, had an accident and was disabled for weeks.”9

  When it was time for the December meeting, Mencken was too busy putting the finishing touches on the latest version of his dictionary to make it to New York. “I surely hope [it all] passes off without any approach to bloodshed or mutilation,” he wrote to Blanche. “If anyone is actually killed, please send a wreath in my name.” He was jovial because his work was going well: “I am making pretty good progress with my two indexes, and hope to be able to finish the job by Christmas.” Since Knopf’s first edition of The American Language, the company had published three more editions, each updated. This time, Mencken concluded that it was American, not British, English that was in the ascendancy. He was currently working on two more supplemental indexes to the book, one to be published in 1945, the other not until 1948, the year he would see his writing end for good.10

  * * *

  As the new year began, Blanche’s eye troubles escalated, her eyes sometimes so dry she had to blink incessantly, squinting to keep them open. And surely they were not improved by her spending the next few months on still more trips out west to toil over the latest ideas of Raymond Chandler, who was living in the Santa Monica hills and whose needs—his writerly insecurities and his fears—seemed endless. She pushed herself hard, anticipating celebrating the end of the European war. But just before May 8, when Blanche was back at the office and victory bells rang out over Manhattan, such plans were squelched. Pat, surprising her with his early army discharge, was stunned to walk in on his mother and Hubert Hohe, kissing passionately in Blanche’s office. Furious, he went to live with his father in Purchase, at least as Pat told the story after his mother’s death. According to an interview that the biographer Peter Prescott had with Mildred Knopf near the end of her life, however, she and Edwin had warned Pat about the affair during his discharge visit with them before he went on to New York.