But by the end of the year, Blanche was forced to deal with a personal crisis. Without warning, Hubert Hohe had left her.
* * *
One night Bill Koshland escorted Blanche to the opera, where they spotted Hohe in the guest box of the singer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf—Hohe obviously making no attempt to keep his new romance secret. According to Ruth, Blanche was shattered, sobbing for days. The worst of it was Hohe’s insistence upon having deliberately loud, “violent” sex with new lovers in his next-door apartment, whose thin walls had been engineered for the easy “visits” between Hohe and Blanche.6
Maybe Hohe was tired of being at Blanche’s beck and call, in essence, her kept lover. Ruth would recall that for whatever reason, he became cruel, remaining in the duplex and, as Koshland had said, “deliberately torturing Blanche … in his passion slamming against their shared door just so she would hear.” Eventually Blanche recovered enough from the trauma to worry about the prosaic: Hohe had borrowed “a lot of her gold flatware—Dirilyte, very expensive—and dishes and things were in his apartment and she was worried about how she was going to get them back. Now that he had another girlfriend.” Added to the years of dedicated but nonetheless demanding work for Blanche, the drama and intrigue with Hohe were more than Ruth could take, and as soon as her employer seemed sturdy enough, she quit.7
Whether this was one of the times when Blanche tried to kill herself, obliquely referred to by Knopf board members and family during interviews after her death, is unknown. What little we do know about the aftermath of Blanche’s affair with Hohe comes from vague references to her unhappiness that she makes in letters to friends, including the agents Jenny Bradley in Paris and Carol Brandt in New York. Carol, in a long-term relationship with the Little, Brown author John Marquand (her husband, Carl Brandt, was perfectly fine with the arrangement; the threesome often dined together), had counseled her friend to live as she did, finding a new lover with whom Alfred was comfortable, making their meetings more comfortable for everyone. Blanche’s husband wasn’t as pliant as Carol’s, and though Blanche had tried to pull off her own kind of triangular relationship, keeping her husband and her lover apart, at moments she must have felt she had lost both men.
Within six months, however, Blanche had not only recovered but had rededicated herself to putting her marriage back on track, establishing a tolerable equilibrium. On July 18, as if overcome by nepenthe, she wrote to Alfred, smiley face included:
Very late
Darling—today I got a wonderful long hand letter from you which I appreciate and love and will cherish; you object to my letters from England—Darling I saw about 200 people in three weeks—it is worth going there and seeing them but anything personal is 1. Not to be dictated and 2. Long hand letters at this hour are the best one can do …
I doubt that I will go to Milan—it is all too complicated—I have a plane out of Guyana to London 3 August which I will postpone a couple of days if I can: I fly to Zurich on the 26th and if I don’t go to Milan I’ll go to Geneva on the 30 where I will be at the Hotel Beau Rivage—going to Lancôme, etc. until I leave on the 3rd. Doubt the plane on the 6th for New York—more likely 8th or 10th—that all depends on Milan and how many days London takes—the 4th is a bank holiday and no one will be back until Tuesday lunch the 5th.
Now, if this letter sounds mad pay no attention to it—it is 2 am … I haven’t seen Camus, Sartre, Labmiet or Gaston G. everyone is away but I’ll pray! I saw Gide however for two hours yesterday and he is really a very great man—wonderful.
Take care of yourself—France is funny but all right I guess: it reminds me of us! They spend more than they have and like their comforts and luxuries too—wine—food, lunch at Larve just as always.
That the publishing business is bad does honestly not surprise me—it had to go this way: certainly you have talked about its happening for months.
Take care—it’s fun to know you and be part of you etc etc
Devotedly☺8
It was a difficult spring and Blanche missed Koussevitzky’s concerts for the first time ever. To Natalya she wrote of sinus problems “plus something they call Tic Delarosa [sic] was too much for me.”9 Tic douloureux, a syndrome whose episodes of excruciating pain on the sides of the face last up to several minutes, runs along the trigeminal nerve, responsible for facial sensation and for biting and chewing. Blanche had reported several such episodes throughout her life, the cause unexplained until recently, and the pain possibly another reason she typically ate so little.
On April 24, 1947, the seventy-three-year-old Willa Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage in her home at 570 Park Avenue. She had completed her last book, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, in 1940, confessing to the Knopfs her dark conviction that the world was self-destructing. She was interred in the Old Burying Ground in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
On July 17, Blanche lost another author when MacKinlay Kantor chose Random House (which paid much better than Knopf) to publish his next book. The midwestern writer and London war correspondent who had celebrated the liberation of Paris at Blanche’s New York apartment wrote her that while he was certain he and Bennett Cerf would get along, he believed that he and Alfred would be at odds constantly.
That winter there was a rapprochement in the Knopfs’ seesaw marriage, and Alfred holed up in Blanche’s apartment after work during a treacherous storm. Holding the record at the time for the worst snowstorm in New York City history, the blizzard of 1947 dropped 26.4 inches of snow in Central Park over the last few days of December. As the storm barreled its way through Manhattan, stranding cars and buses and halting subway service, it claimed seventy-seven lives. The next day, determined to catch a train at Grand Central for a meeting in Cleveland, Alfred set out from the apartment. Finding that nothing was running, he checked into a hotel; his having spent one night on his wife’s turf was enough for them both. Pat believed his father was “afraid of whom he might find there.” But in telling the story himself decades later, Alfred, emphasizing Blanche’s “hospitality” to him, said Blanche was “giving a party but that she’d been right about the weather and he was embarrassed to return.”10
On the first day of 1948, Knopf officially released The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster (sent to reviewers earlier), along with The Blood of Others, Simone de Beauvoir’s novel. Forster’s stories were a combination of his 1911 and 1928 collections, while The Blood of Others was written during the war. Beauvoir herself would, in 1960, criticize her book, about the paradoxical nature of freedom, for being tendentious.
Soon after these launches, Blanche headed to La Jolla, a suburb of San Diego, where Raymond Chandler now lived and where Blanche still tended to his frequent attacks of “nerves.” She then took a short spring trip to London, Paris, and Rome, where, alert to opportune book topics, she began a dialogue with various officials about the worrisome situation of the Russians in Berlin. When she got home, she sent to Europe still more boxes of supplies that her authors and various friends and acquaintances had requested.
As usual upon Blanche’s arrival in New York, Alfred greeted her enthusiastically, though anger eddied in the air minutes after the Knopfs said hello. Blanche wrote Jenny Bradley that “it was all back to normal within hours.”11 But another mood swing soon occurred when she and Alfred were honored as the premier publishers and participants at Dallas’s national book exhibition. In an optimistic state of mind, Blanche agreed to take a cross-country road trip with her husband in June. Neither could have foreseen its enormous impact on Alfred’s future, though his enthusiasm proved yet another hindrance to the marriage. Where Alfred saw the rugged beauty of the West, Blanche was unnerved by it, her vision and her physical stamina unequal to the rigorous hikes Alfred gloried in taking. When they entered Yellowstone, Alfred stood in awe of the sublime landscape, while Blanche was filled with dread.
“The West has gotten in my blood something awful,” Alfred would later tell Wallace Stegner when the two worked together on a collection o
f essays about Yellowstone’s Dinosaur park. More than he realized, Alfred, who these days had become much less emotionally invested in Knopf than Blanche was, had found something of his own. “I have just got to go out there again to make sure it’s real.”12 Dating from his 1948 trip, Alfred thereafter planned a long working vacation in the West every summer, with shorter trips in between. Surprisingly, his most substantial contribution to conservation would not be through publishing so much as his efforts with conservation groups of the 1950s and 1960s—a passion that put even more responsibility on Blanche back in New York.
On August 11, Mencken, in Manhattan for the first time since covering the presidential conventions in Philadelphia, took Blanche to lunch at ‘21.’ Dropping by the office to pick her up, he recorded in his journal his shock at seeing her read a letter with an oversized magnifying glass. When she still couldn’t make out what she saw, thinking no one was looking, she handed the page to her secretary to read aloud.13 By October, in part because of her weakened physical state and her worsening ocular problems, Blanche reversed her habit of sending supplies to her friends in war-ravaged Europe. She wrote Jenny Bradley several times to ask her help. Dresses, coats, jewelry, bags, glassware, napkins, bed linen—Jenny boxed it all, many of the requests executed to Blanche’s specifications.
Only once was the agent exasperated: the Knopf mailing labels said “book,” and she and Blanche could be charged with fraud if anyone opened the packages. Knowing how tedious going through customs could be of late, and eager to conform to legal standards, Blanche told Jenny to mark the labels correctly. But mail was not yet back to normal, certainly not overseas mail, and it took several back-and-forths, with the boxes delayed, while the two women figured out the new regulations.14 Both were taken aback by how much work such a previously simple task had become.
Things Italian rather than French were on Blanche’s mind of late, her energies directed toward Bernard Berenson, the great connoisseur of Renaissance art, at I Tatti, his home outside Florence. Having met him while abroad through their mutual acquaintance Natalie Barney, Blanche wanted to persuade Berenson to write a book for Knopf, and her shrewd letters to him sound like a quattrocento maiden flattering a would-be lover: “I have just seen your article in Harper’s Bazaar,” she wrote, “together with a quite magnificent photograph of you that I would like to have if you can spare one. It was a very high point in my visit, I assure you, to meet you, and I shall not forget the few moments we had together.”15 The fulsome Berenson responded with the Latin phrase Catholics spoke before receiving communion, “Domine non sum dignus” (“Lord, I am not worthy”), before continuing to write, “No other publisher has ever been so generous to me. How can I put myself even with you!”16
* * *
Blanche was eager for the first of Geoffrey Hellman’s three-part New Yorker series on the Knopfs to hit the stands, which would be as always a week earlier than its official publication date of November 20, 1948. But the title, “Publisher,” with its singular noun, was an indication of what was to come. Blanche had been rendered largely invisible. According to Hellman, Alfred was a “more durable topic of conversation” than any other publisher in the past thirty years.17 With a list of around four thousand published titles, Knopf issued about a hundred titles a year. The man is “at once both Olympian and dressy; few literary men can stare him down. His aspect is bold and piratical. He has bushy black eyebrows; a bristling moustache, once jet and now gray.”18 Hellman quotes the writer Robert Nathan, fiercely loyal to Blanche, who bought Portrait of Jennie, his strong-selling 1940 novel about a Depression-era, hallucinatory romance: “He and Blanche are like Jupiter and Juno. He is the ultimate, she the penultimate, but in her own right just as ultimate.”19 The journalist explained that the Knopfs themselves brought in about two-thirds of the books they published, and their editors the rest.
Once again, Blanche felt blindsided: Hellman had interviewed both Knopfs, leading her to believe that the long article would be about the couple, with the focus divided equally between them. Certainly Hellman managed to suggest Blanche’s importance, even naming several of her authors—but the pieces made it clear that Knopf was really Alfred, and his wife his assistant. Blanche complained to Mencken, who mentioned in a letter to his old fellow writer from The Smart Set and The American Mercury George Jean Nathan that she was furious. Allowing Blanche to vent her anger, Mencken advised her to let the article pass, though he agreed that Hellman was indiscreet to write that Knopf did a $2 million annual business.
It would be the last time she would turn to her shrewd companion for advice. That November, the Knopfs lost their best friend. Just a few weeks after they went to Philadelphia to hear him lecture, Henry Mencken had a massive stroke. They had lauded his eloquence at dinner after the talk, when they finally got the chance to discuss his coverage of Philly’s Republican and Democratic conventions. The stroke permanently damaged several brain areas, leaving the journalist unable to read or write. Though he lived another seven years, the Knopfs hardly recognized the man they both adored.
Blanche was distraught. The idea of Henry reduced to this state was impossible for her to grasp until she went down to Baltimore to see him. After all, Henry had been the only reliable connection between her and Alfred, and a driving force behind their company. She was glad he still had his brother, August, to care for him at his family home at 1524 Hollins Street. Geoffrey Hellman’s next two New Yorker articles suddenly mattered little, with her dear Menck clearly so diminished.
In part to take her mind off her friend, Blanche made her carefully planned diplomatic journey to Germany a priority. She would recount that “last July, in 1948, I thought that General Clay was doing so important a job with the Berlin airlift that it should be put into permanent record. I wrote him and suggested his doing a book. We corresponded for several months and he asked that when I came to Europe next I come down to his theatre … I was [there again] in the early autumn, and I let him know, and he invited me to see him.”20
She applauded the Berlin Airlift, with America and its allies working through the Marshall Plan to keep the Germans from starving, transporting food and water to the millions in need. General Lucius Clay didn’t think Americans understood what their military was doing, and Clay told Blanche he wanted her to help him spread the word back home. He also wanted to discuss a potential contract for a book he might write for Knopf once he resigned. Flying on an army transport from Springfield, Massachusetts, in early 1949, Blanche recorded in a small notebook every detail of the trip, called “Operation Vittles” by Americans but Operation Airlift by others. Ultimately an eleven-month effort, it had been ongoing for six and a half months by the time Blanche arrived in Frankfurt, where in a few days she would board a C-57 to fly into Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport again.
The plane circled Frankfurt for an hour in the fog before landing, in what Blanche would consider “the coldest most miserable post I have ever been in. Worse than Dakar. Two small coal fires, no lights, all of us freezing, Parachutes, top coats, hats on.” Three hours later they landed, and, “to my surprise, both Clay’s and Air Force officers met me, and cleared me in five minutes.”
Now she just had to fly to Berlin, some three hundred miles away. She boarded a C-54, with parachutes distributed after everyone was seated. Meanwhile, the small crew was struggling to load onto the plane the huge sacks of flour that hungry Germans awaited. At the last minute, Major General William Tunner, chief of the airlift, arrived (his parachute already in place) to serve as copilot. The winter storms out of Frankfurt meant he had to fly low, about 6,500 feet, with a tonnage of ten thousand pounds, well above the regulation six thousand. Planes took off or landed at Tempelhof every five minutes from two runways—the second one recently built to accommodate the allies’ endeavor.
From four thousand feet, Tunner descended on target, via directions from the tower that he listened to through earphones. He dropped fast, roughly a thousand feet per minute, almost missing the
Berlin airstrip. Blanche would remember how a “mere boy” from the Midwest told everyone to prepare for a crash landing. “We were all plenty tense,” she recalled. “But we made it in.”
Blanche was given guest quarters at General Clay’s Harnock House. Deutsche marks were three to a dollar legally; on the black market, they were up to twenty-one. The night she arrived, she invited eight newspapermen and -women to a late dinner, then “went back to CBS’s broadcast journalist Bill Downs’ house—no lights, candles, all of us with flashlights.” The next morning in General Clay’s office, previously the secondary Luftwaffe headquarters with “black and white marble floors, marble walls, gardens, etc,” the two had a long session, “nine to almost twelve.” They liked each other, and Blanche wrote in her own Berlin diary that she was “very impressed with Clay, good personality; certainly no sympathy for the Germans but understanding that unless we work with them and put them on their feet ultimately the Russians will take over … The general dictated and signed a letter agreeing to give me his book as soon as he resigned, which he trusted would be a matter of months.”
Blanche lunched with Time-Life’s bureau chief, Emmett Hughes, who had “done several articles on Hitler before his election, on Berlin, and on the occupation of Germany,” and who wanted Knopf to publish his next book. Then she “saw two more German publishers. Paper difficulties are still great … About three o’clock by then, had coffee and went to find various publishers. Berlin dark at four, no electricity until six, inside and outside black except in military government buildings.” Still, she became uncharacteristically impatient with the complaints of German publishers: “I finally lost my temper with one and explained that England and France did not have too much and had very little electricity as well.”
Dropping her bags at the Press Club for her departure the next day, Blanche was surprised to find the atmosphere “that of war … there were no lights and news had just come in that a C-54 had crashed in England and all six boys aboard all dead. No news of who they were—everyone waiting for the names and details. What kind of music did I want?—schmaltz. [Everyone] sang and danced [until] news came in about the plane which had burned and all the boys had been burned. There was a feeling of disaster, of being dead by morning, of living only for that moment, exactly as one felt during the war and the bombings in England.”
The Lady with the Borzoi Page 24
