The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  Whether or not Blanche and Hohe met Pat with the amorous scene he recalled, he was outraged that his mother was willing to have an affair right under his father’s nose. Blanche seems to have assumed Pat would come to terms with Hohe’s presence, and she turned to the planning of her first trip to the Continent since the war had begun. She wrote Jenny Bradley, “There must be many new writers who are doing work that will be invaluable for us … I hear that Jean-Paul Sartre is doing good work.”11 Early in 1945 she had written Bradley that “I am naturally eager to get whatever good books there are in France today and perhaps there are a good many I do not know about.”12 Three weeks and a few days after Germany’s surrender, in June, Blanche was able to get a job as a War Department employee, whose files list her as a consultant earning twenty-five dollars per diem. Starting in France, she then traveled to nine German cities, probably, in light of her army ID card stamped “valid only if captured by the enemy,” officially on behalf of the United States government (similar to her earlier efforts in South America). “I knew the war [in Europe] was over when Blanche turned up in Paris,” one journalist said.13 As if to pick up where she and her writers had left off, she took a suite at the Ritz, as always facing the Place Vendôme with its magnificent garden.

  Here she met with authors who were eager to have an audience. Among her immediate acquisitions in 1945 was Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential drama No Exit, with a few more pieces promised, all beautifully translated by Stuart Gilbert and published by Knopf in 1947 as No Exit (Huis Clos): A Play in One Act along with The Flies (Les Mouches): A Play in Three Acts.

  Still performed today, No Exit focuses on three characters—two women and one man—who are confined together in a locked space in hell. The play posits mental torture as being worse than its physical counterpart. Though Blanche believed the work intellectually provocative, the recent book for which she felt the deepest emotional attachment was Albert Camus’s The Stranger, to be released by Knopf in April 1946. She was eager to meet Camus, who, like Blanche (and most in her world), was adamantly antitotalitarian. His writing had fascinated her from the moment Jenny Bradley convinced her to read The Stranger in French several years earlier. The novel told the story of Meursault, a solitary Algerian who lived with little sense of communal connection. Neither living nor dying seemed of consequence. Its title alone (the French original closer to meaning “The Foreigner”) evoked isolation and alienation, the narrative opening with its main character delivering the flat line “Mother died today.” As does everything, her death leaves Meursault cold, a fact that others around him add to the list of his shortcomings. As a white Frenchman born in the North American colony of Algeria, Meursault is both local and alien—the human condition, the novel suggests. A thriller leeched of power, the book’s plot of a killing and the resultant punishment is perceived by the murderer as if in a dream. Its protagonist neither accepting nor railing against his punishment—his own death—The Stranger emphasizes that what we hold to be normal will be denied its hero. When Meursault is sentenced to death by guillotine, he finally experiences fear, though still no remorse.14

  During their first meeting in 1945, Blanche was immediately dazzled by the writer. She and Camus met several more times during this visit, and spoke “about his writing, his future, his past, his plans, young writers in France, Pasternak, English writers, American writers, ourselves, everything, in these curious sessions we had together.”15 Blanche also convinced him to talk about his work in the Resistance as a French-Alsatian journalist, as well as his writing motivated by Vichy France. Just twenty-seven when the Germans occupied Paris, Camus evoked strong maternal, even romantic feelings in Blanche; throughout the next decade she lavished him with gifts and infused her letters with just a hint of intimacy. Bill Koshland would dismiss an interviewer’s suggestion that she and Camus had an affair, saying instead that she obviously had a “crush” on him.16 From her initial reading of The Stranger—with its focus on individual freedom, and on choosing how to feel even when we have no control over actual events—Blanche had known she would sign the author.

  She hadn’t realized, however, before that lunch at the Paris Ritz, that she would encounter a man whose worldview matched her own more closely than that of anyone she had ever met. “Who would have guessed you would be the one I’ve been seeking all my life?” she wrote to Camus.17 From their first meeting in 1945, at least twice a year thereafter she and Camus would meet, usually at the Ritz for tea or coffee, always in the mid-afternoon, when they could be assured of privacy. Conversing for hours, the author granted Blanche’s opinions a kind of respect and interest she rarely experienced. At their cafe table, topics ranged from existentialism to “absurdism,” lending an intellectual charge to their discourse.

  Blanche soon knew all about Camus’s unhappy wife and his various love affairs. World War II and the long marital separations it caused had hit the Camus marriage hard, leading Albert to consider divorce. Simon Lea, president of the Camus Society UK, believes that Camus treated his wife, Francine, “like a sister” while wanting to marry his lover, the actress María Casares. Francine, suffering a severe depression that caused her to be hospitalized, leapt from her window in a failed suicide attempt. According to Lea, Camus was horrified and felt powerless to intercede, a scenario he replayed in The Fall, with its plummeting woman whom the hero fails to rescue. Blanche was aware that her friend believed his infidelities had brought on his wife’s depression—at an early stage in Francine’s breakdown she had repeatedly mumbled “María Casares”—an assumption that led to immense guilt on his part. Blanche was too devoted to Camus to allow him to accept such responsibility, and she assured him that when people were depressed, only time, with luck, could heal them.

  Not everyone was impressed by Blanche’s dedication to her writers. In Purchase, neighbor Peggy Cullman, a volunteer with Army Air Forces intelligence and public relations, was “surprised and frozen with horror”—as was Pat, she claimed—that Blanche was “one of the first civilians to go [to Europe].” Not abroad to assist the military, Blanche showed herself “entirely inappropriate; she was over there selfishly to sign up authors. No one was going to be benefited except Knopf publishing or Blanche herself.” This was the kind of thing, Peggy suggested, that Alfred would “never do,” though she grudgingly admitted that “in an odd way” he clearly respected his wife for doing it.18 Peggy, a striking young woman who in more than one photograph laughs admiringly as Alfred flourishes his cigar, at times sounds as if she’s jealous of Blanche—who missed too many of her dinner parties in Purchase and had gained unseemly renown during the war. She failed to understand how often Blanche served as a nursemaid to displaced authors in those days, and how taking care of writers was the publisher’s self-appointed mission.

  That summer of 1945, Blanche was busy tending to Thomas Mann, who was celebrating his seventieth birthday in New York City, where he delivered a lecture at Hunter College. While New Yorkers were sweltering from a heat wave, he arrived to rooms at the St. Regis festooned with flowers, many of which Blanche had sent. Mann, his wife, Katia, and their daughter Monika went on to spend June 13–24 at Mohonk Mountain House at the edge of the Catskills. They occupied rooms 468 and 470, as a concierge will tell the curious even today. Mann was working on Doctor Faustus and would use the Mohonk setting for his novel. “The stately hotel … built in the Swiss style and run by Quakers, is situated in a park-like landscape of rugged hills, a kind of nature sanctuary in the Victorian taste,” he wrote. “It was just the place for a rest, and at this time of year the air was a good deal cooler than sweltering, stuffy New York.”19

  On some evenings Alfred and Blanche joined the Manns for the chamber music played in the lounge, but Blanche was eager to get to the Alps, not the Catskills. After she was sure the Manns were well acclimated, she turned to Elizabeth Bowen, who had written that she was without shoes that fit. Blanche knew that her long feet were hard to accommodate, so she went to Saks and bought three pairs
that “delighted her.” Elizabeth’s pleasant but platonic marriage alongside a long-lived, sexually rewarding love affair was just what Blanche sought at this point in her life. Now Bowen thanked Blanche by joking that “Alan [her spouse] loved the shoes too; he [is] just short of being a fetishist.”20 Blanche had no difficulty incorporating the purchase of footwear into her routine, if it meant making a writer—or dear friend—happy. Wartime shortages had allowed her to minister usefully to her authors, such service a source of pleasure for her and the basis of further fealty from others.

  Late that summer, Blanche returned to Purchase, where she continued to retaliate for Alfred’s mistreatment of her in the office. On a hot September afternoon at the wedding of the Cullmans’ son, the cleric was taken aback by Blanche’s black lace camisole—when she removed her matching silk jacket to dance with him. “Mrs. Knopf is wearing an interesting outfit. For a horrible moment I had the feeling she was in her underwear,” the minister said to Peggy. At first, the groom’s mother tried to cover for Blanche. “That is the latest thing in Paris suits,” she responded. But when the minister persisted, saying, “Doesn’t it look like underwear?” Peggy replied, “I can understand your thinking it was.”21 Others who were present remember how on “the very warm wedding day Blanche shocked and amused guests by taking off her dress and dancing in her shift with the clergyman.”22 Apparently the minister didn’t object to Blanche entirely.

  The Cullmans saw much more of Alfred in Purchase than of his wife, “who was never there.” When Blanche did in fact show up for dinner from time to time, Peggy disliked the “phony” way she acted, not realizing that her neighbor was responding to the host’s obvious disdain. “She’d take three pieces of asparagus on her plate and say, ‘This is undoubtedly the most marvelous asparagus I’ve ever tasted; you must tell me what your cook does to it.’” Or “Alfred, dear, what is the wine? Write it down.”23 Reluctantly, Cullman admitted that Alfred was also difficult, mercurial at the least. Even when Blanche tried to meet him halfway, he’d have none of it. “Blanche would say, ‘It’s a nice day’ and Alfred would respond, ‘If you like this kind of day, I suppose it is; you always like peculiar days, Blanche.’ They quarreled 99 times out of 100.”24

  * * *

  On New Year’s Eve, 1945, crowds cheered: there were at least 750,000 people gathered in Times Square when, at the top of the New York Times building, the famous ball appeared. This was the first time after a two-year blackout that the globe would make its slow but certain descent to welcome a new year. There was no mistake: the war was truly over. Blanche was probably looking out her apartment’s plate-glass window, watching crowds of New Yorkers walking toward Midtown, many with tear-streaked cheeks like her own. She had been deeply worried about her son, and now, even though there were tensions, he was home, one of the lucky ones.

  On January 1, 1946, Knopf released James M. Cain’s Past All Dishonor, which Blanche had encouraged Cain to write. The historical murder mystery was a complicated book whose theme of mixed loyalties seems at times another variation on Romeo and Juliet. Within weeks of its successful launch, with sales solid, Blanche, in strong spirits, took another brief trip to visit friends in England. In London, she was dismayed to see how the country continued to struggle; at Brown’s Hotel, for instance, even tea was half a crown. Having assessed the British reality, back in Manhattan she immediately sent off generous boxes to her London friends: silk stockings for the women along with sumptuous food for everyone, including butter and filet mignon—accompanied by instructions from her cook on preparing the beef.

  Working in her office, Blanche prepared the first of several invitation lists for the lavish parties she was throwing in honor of Albert Camus, who was traveling to New York City for the April 11 American release of The Stranger, translated into English by the British scholar (and friend of James Joyce, as the publishers often said) Stuart Gilbert. Sailing on the Oregon from Le Havre, the writer arrived in Manhattan on March 25. Within three days, Camus had embarked on a jam-packed speaking tour, starting with a talk he gave at Columbia University’s McMillin Theatre. In early April Blanche gave the fanciest of her dinners in his honor, her guest list including M. and Mme René Julliard, M. and Mme Raymond Gallimard, Ambassador and Mrs. David Bruce, Elizabeth Bowen, and others. But the connection Camus treasured most occurred at the French Institute on April 16, where the thirty-two-year-old writer met a nineteen-year-old student, Patricia Blake, with whom he was “instantly” infatuated and who became one of his many lovers. (She was still with him more than ten years later, in France.)

  Camus, handled brilliantly by Blanche, was a smash in New York. Partisan Review’s editor, William Phillips, called him “the most attractive man I have ever met.”25 The journalist Adam Gopnik noted, more than half a century later, that Camus enjoyed his American reception enough to write home to his French publisher: “You know, I can get a film contract whenever I want.” As Gopnik reminds us, “Looking at the famous portrait of Camus by Henri Cartier-Bresson from the forties—trenchcoat collar up, hair swept back, and cigarette in mouth; long, appealing lined face and active, warm eyes—you see why people thought of him as a star and not just as a sage; you also see that he knew the effect he was having.”26

  The New Yorker writers who met Camus during his 1946 visit were less starstruck. In a comment published after Camus’s death, A. J. Liebling sympathetically recalled the author’s only visit to the States: “He was thirty-two but looked barely twenty, and he was pale and thin from tuberculosis and from erratic feeding during the occupation. His clothes were at once immature and archaic, since he had bought them when he was much younger.”27 And Lewis Thompson, who wrote a 1946 “Talk of the Town” piece about the visit, took note of Camus’s “type” of look, “slicked hair, patterned sweater and baggy trousers.”28

  The Stranger initially sold more than twelve thousand copies, a good number for most novels and excellent for a book in translation (now regarded as a classic of modern literature). During Camus’s visit, Blanche convinced him that Knopf should publish his second novel, The Plague (released in France in 1947), before putting out any of his earlier plays or philosophical works. She pushed Knopf’s board to allot a larger-than-usual advertising budget, creating such strong sales (larger even than those of The Stranger) that Camus soon bought himself the motorcycle he had long dreamed of owning.29

  PART FOUR

  19

  MORE BATTLES AFTER ALL

  BEFORE CAMUS LEFT NEW YORK, Blanche shared with him her plans for the first war-free summer in years: in July 1946, after stopping with Alfred in London, she would continue to Germany, just months before the initial phase of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals would be concluded in October. Early that year, Knopf had published Robert H. Jackson’s The Case Against the Nazi War Criminals, the book leading to an invitation from Jackson, chief justice and United States prosecutor, for Blanche and Alfred to be his guests at the trials. They had begun the previous November, soon after the war’s end, and this continuing phase dealt with the major war criminals. Tasked with trying twenty-three of the most important political and military leaders of the Third Reich, the tribunal was frequently a wrenching experience, its testimony filled with accounts of inhumanity so brutal that Blanche would never speak about what she heard.1 Alfred had opted to return home from London, claiming his wife had a stronger constitution. “I had no stomach for what, I admit, must have been a fascinating experience.”2

  Soon Blanche would publish John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a seminal account of the atomic bomb’s impact on the Japanese after the attack on August 6, 1945. The Knopfs had agreed that Hersey’s book would first appear in the August 31, 1946, New Yorker, an issue devoted entirely to his work. Never before had the magazine turned over a complete issue to a single piece of reportage, and it sold out instantly. Albert Einstein alone ordered a thousand copies and Bernard Baruch five hundred. Knopf followed with its October book release, which eventually sold 3.5 million
copies. The Book-of-the-Month Club distributed Hiroshima as a “special gift book.”3

  Considered a precursor of the New Journalism of the sixties and seventies, Hiroshima is an account of six people who lived through the world’s first atomic attack. Hersey’s meticulous prose details the bombing of the city and its aftermath, allowing the tragedy to unfold intimately and in deeply human terms. About a young clerk whose body was mangled in the explosion and had bookcases fall on top of her, Hersey writes, “In the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.”4 Decades after their original talk, one of the victims Hersey had interviewed told him that among his most bitter regrets was being unable to bury the dead or keep track of the corpses dragged to mass cremations. In March 1999, New York University’s journalism department announced the winner of its contest (judged by a thirty-five-member panel) to determine the hundred best pieces of twentieth-century American journalism; Hersey’s book was number one.5

  Blanche was thrilled at Hiroshima’s success: she believed nothing could be more gratifying than publishing a book that changed how we look at the world, and Hersey’s unblinking accounts forced readers to engage with philosophical questions about war. From the beginning of Knopf, Blanche had sensed that her profession enabled such discourse. And the reading public these days offered new opportunities. Before the war, higher education had been for the privileged, but in 1947, nearly 500,000 Americans graduated from college, compared with 160,000 in 1939. Among those graduates were readers eager to find books that spoke to them of what they’d experienced, or at least heard about, overseas.