The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  On September 8, 1952, the Knopfs attended a slightly less fraught event than other recent unions they’d witnessed. Mary Jane Badger, daughter of the World War II spy and Knopf friend Mary Bancroft, was marrying former president William Taft’s grandson, Robert Taft’s son Horace. Irene Jackson and her husband, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, invited the Knopfs to a celebratory dinner at the Jacksons’ hotel suite in Washington. Other guests included Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles (former lover of the bride’s mother), who gave the bride away, and the French ambassador, Henri Bonnet, both with their wives, as usual noted but not named.

  Blanche was in her element. As Frances Lindley said years later, “she was one of the world’s great listeners. Watching her listen to people from whom she wanted information was extraordinary. She would listen to men talking about business affairs. You could see her mind going … She was a hard woman to snow intellectually or conversationally.”17 From Blanche’s habit of close observation, Lindley believed that the publisher had become someone worth listening to: “She didn’t often volunteer advice, but when she did it was of a singularly wise and realistic nature.”18

  * * *

  Back at the office, everyone was eagerly awaiting proofs of The Second Sex. The previous year, several Knopf editors had argued for a two-volume edition because it would bring in more revenue. But the publishers ended up charging ten dollars (equivalent to eighty dollars six decades later) for one large book, which would be less costly to produce. Now Blanche wrote Beauvoir, genially mentioning the author’s continued lack of contact, and suggesting that Beauvoir come over for the American publication, when a “big campaign” was planned. She received no response, as usual.

  Though in January 1953 Knopf brought out a mini biography of Willa Cather written by her longtime companion, Edith Lewis, The Second Sex commanded all the attention. Striving to stress the scholarly nature of the book while allowing ads and brochures to suggest the sexual content as well, weeks of a Knopf publicity blitz preceded its appearance. Finally, on February 24, 1953, the English version of The Second Sex arrived in stores, the bulky ten-dollar volume proving an immediate academic and commercial success.

  Still, the book was criticized for its difficulty, which was generally blamed on the translation, though the original prose had been considered hard going in French as well. At least Blanche had had confidence in the translator, Howard Parshley, a highly respected anthropology professor at Smith College, who repeatedly asked Beauvoir for her preferences and clarifications. (She often failed to answer, at times seeming deliberately, even maliciously uncooperative, just to impede the American publication. Parshley had a heart attack in 1950, but quickly resumed work on The Second Sex.) Emeritus before he finished the project, the scholar would eventually be fingered as the culprit in what later scholars consider a flawed translation. The faults, however, resulted at least in part from working with an erratic writer, as well as with the various Knopf editors and advisers who further muddled an already complicated text.19

  As Blanche predicted, the book’s significance far outlasted that of the Kinsey Report on women, whose forthcoming publication on the heels of the Beauvoir volume had worried Blanche, who feared it would capture the women’s market. The Second Sex, however, was more than a thesis on women’s sexuality: it drew on sociology, culture, physiology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and more.

  Whether translated as “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” or “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”—dropping the “a” to make “woman” universal—Beauvoir’s message was incendiary, her book igniting a fresh wave of feminism. The Vatican banned it. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu would declare in a prepublication blurb that “The Second Sex is the healthiest, wealthiest, and wisest book that has ever been written on women and, therefore, also on men. It will be read, I predict, for generations as one of the great expressions of the human spirit of our culture.” He continued: “It is a great book … [ranking next to] John Stuart Mill’s ‘The Subjection of Women.’”20 But in his contribution to a collection of opinions in the February 21, 1953, issue of the Saturday Review, he would admit to being disappointed with Beauvoir’s acceptance of the stereotype sometimes made of the American woman. Karl Menninger believed The Second Sex to be repetitive and to overlook the place of men in sexual relations. Philip Wylie, best known for his A Generation of Vipers, which excoriates just about the entire American culture of the 1940s, especially middle-aged American women, said, “The Second Sex is one of the few great books of our era”—flowing from “a quality men often deny to women: genius.”21

  Finally, Margaret Mead, forthright but respectful, had her say: Beauvoir’s treatise deserved more knowledge than its author possessed. Too, the writer failed to confront the great difference between American and French attitudes toward women, France still denying them birth control although its abortion rate was the same as its birthrate. It was a culture in which women had traditionally hidden their power behind men’s. Nonetheless, The Second Sex was a “rare, exasperating, but unfailingly interesting experience … torrential, brilliant, wonderfully angry.”22 Decades later, in the feminist 1980s, the literary critic Jane Gallop would say that “she learned how to masturbate by reading Beauvoir.”23

  Howard Parshley’s name as translator and editor of The Second Sex was inadvertently omitted from the volume’s dust jacket, deeply disappointing the man. At least he finally allowed himself to buy a new Buick with his hard-won royalties: it had been a trial to complete the translation with so little help from Beauvoir. Sadly, the retired professor would enjoy the car a mere four months before dying on May 19, 1953. Assuming Beauvoir hadn’t heard the distressing news, Blanche sent her the Times obituary saying, “I thought you might want to know about Howard Parshley’s death.” Apparently the writer didn’t respond; she found Blanche trivial.

  While such animated book reviews were producing a largely positive audience, Blanche worried about several of her other authors, closer to home and threatened with testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Langston Hughes and Dashiell Hammett were to appear before the group on March 24. Eloquent and respectful, Hughes managed to outmaneuver Roy Cohn and the rest of Joseph McCarthy’s lieutenants.24 Explaining why several years ago he had repudiated his earlier sympathy for Soviet ideals and goals, Hughes gracefully explained that he no longer trusted the USSR—though, as one biographer has noted, “not once had he unequivocally attacked” its form of government.25

  At the end of his hearing, Hughes would tell a friend he was bewildered by the wink Joseph McCarthy gave him. If McCarthy really believed that he and Hughes were now equal, he was missing completely what the biographer Arnold Rampersad would call the writer’s “tour de force,” where he had disarmed the committee’s “hostility and preserved something of his dignity.”26 After Hughes testified that day, Hammett, who had served five months in prison in 1951, was recalled before HUAC, where he once again refused to answer even benign questions (such as his current address), making Blanche still happier that he was no longer her problem. Edward R. Murrow, yet another Knopf connection, would be the force that led “the counterattack on McCarthy.”27 Earlier that year, after The New York Times implied that Thomas Mann, through his association with Paul Robeson, was linked to communism, Mann wrote the Times an angry letter that Alfred dissuaded him from sending. Mann’s disappointment and disgust at what he saw as America’s present “hysteria” led him to move, in 1952, to Zurich.28

  Given the climate, Alfred and Blanche probably assumed (correctly) that they, too, were on some low-level anticommunist watch. FBI files show a halfhearted attempt to keep track of Alfred, overlooking entirely the hundreds of letters he wrote to congressmen denouncing McCarthy. After all, Alfred was considered the publisher of Dashiell Hammett, with Blanche assessed as the “Vice President” who “takes no active part in the business affairs.” Especially after Knopf published a 1957 book by
the accused communist spy Alger Hiss, In the Court of Public Opinion, the FBI kept an eye on the publishers. Years later, in a 1964 report, Blanche was said to have “supported various front organizations”—the most important being the ACLU—that were “heavily infiltrated with Communists” at the time.29

  In April, just as tensions over the HUAC hearings subsided, Blanche read about a recent concert of Jascha Heifetz’s that had gone awry in the state of Israel, officially formed in May 1948. During his third visit to the still emotionally raw Jewish country, Heifetz had included in his program the Violin Sonata in E-flat by Richard Strauss, considered by many Israelis to be a Nazi composer, whose works were unofficially banned along with Richard Wagner’s. The Holocaust had taken place a little more than ten years before, but Heifetz stood his ground: in its purity, music had nothing to do with politics. Even though the Israeli minister of education implored Heifetz to respect local sentiment, he refused, declaring that “the music is above these factors … I will not change my program. I have the right to decide on my repertoire.” He played in six cities, where his performance of the Strauss sonata was met with silence, until, at the second concert in Tel Aviv, a heckler threw something that managed to injure Heifetz’s hand, the wound causing the violinist to cancel the following night’s performance. The news appeared in all the major American newspapers, and Blanche immediately wrote to him of her shock and concern.30

  In what was surely a reprieve from recent politics, including the publication of The Second Sex, Knopf soon released a different kind of book about a modern woman, The Fabulous Fanny: The Story of Fanny Brice, by Norman Katkov. (The biography of the recently deceased entertainer would become the basis of the 1960s Broadway musical and Hollywood movie Funny Girl.) In addition, Knopf published Ross Macdonald’s Meet Me at the Morgue. Blanche knew that Macdonald, even with his ups and downs, was a first-rate writer. Though most reviews were tepid, The New York Times commended the novel as a complex study of a kidnapping with “all the pace and excitement of earlier Macdonald” and a “hard-headed and humane detective.” The Saturday Review was less enthusiastic, calling the writing “capable” but with “chatter [that] occasionally retards action.”31 Blanche remained confident that Macdonald was destined for great appreciation.

  She was deeply distressed, however, by Raymond Chandler’s decision to decamp to Houghton Mifflin. The nervous writer needed higher sales, he told her, apologetically. She’d believed in The Long Goodbye, which had taken him an extended period to finish, and which was soon to be published by Hamish Hamilton in London to all the praise Blanche had anticipated. At least she could now focus on James Baldwin, who was unyielding about rough language he thought appropriate for his new book. Blanche, along with several Knopf editors, had argued against the provocative words and phrases that Baldwin insisted on using in his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. The writer, who stood his ground, convinced Blanche that he was right, whereupon she turned the manuscript over to the house editor Philip Vaudrin. She and Baldwin approved Vaudrin’s editorial suggestions, the three of them working well together. After Baldwin had written a new opening for the book, created stronger characters, and revised the ending, Vaudrin recommended offering $250 for the changes against a $750 advance, but when Blanche wrote Baldwin, she increased the advance to $1,000 instead.32

  Still, the months leading up to publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain had been difficult, and Vaudrin explained to Baldwin that he and Blanche had needed to make more small changes:

  Nothing serious, as you will see, but all advisable from the point of view of censorship … The phrase “and rubbing his hand, before the eyes of Jesus, over his cock” now reads “and making obscene gestures before the eyes of Jesus” … In the scene describing Gabriel’s baptism by immersion, we must drop the last five words of the sentence: “He was drenched, and his thin, white clothes clung like another skin to his black body, and his sex stood up.” I hope you will agree that these last five words don’t alter the force of the whole thing …

  But there was a bit more: where a white cop told an African-American woman, “Well, it ain’t black, honey, but it’s mighty long and hard,” Vaudrin said they were advised to omit the sentence.33

  Baldwin replied from Paris that there was nothing obscene about the book. As for the word “cock,” no one objected to Shakespeare using it—to which Vaudrin, surely with Blanche’s encouragement, politely pointed out that Shakespeare couldn’t be dragged into court. In the end, Baldwin agreed to drop “it ain’t black” but not “and his sex stood up,” explaining at length the crucial relevance of the phrase to the meaning of the story. Vaudrin then cited a House committee currently investigating the morality of paperback novels—“our self-appointed wards of public morality … Why give them any chance at all?”—and insisted on the changes.34

  When it was released to the public in May 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain had an advance sale of only three thousand copies, but it received strong reviews. It was a coming-of-age novel that reflected upon the King James Bible as well as Baldwin’s own life under a severe Pentecostal stepfather. The New York Times called it a “beautiful, furious first novel,” while Kirkus called Go Tell It on the Mountain “a first novel of considerable distinction as well as feeling.” Baldwin’s next submission to Knopf was Giovanni’s Room, one of the earliest books with overt homosexual scenes. The board didn’t think the writing strong enough to justify the publishing risk. Baldwin had refused to amend passages about “cocksucking,” and to Blanche’s reminder that Gide and Van Vechten had both dealt with homosexuality, Alfred said, “But they somehow made it right. Jimmy didn’t.”35 After the board (the term variously used for monthly meetings of stockholders such as Mencken and Alfred’s siblings, or of the editors) voted down the acquisition, with Alfred and Blanche having final say, Baldwin left Knopf for the Dial Press.

  Blanche was deeply disappointed. Baldwin belonged to the literary world she’d envisioned from the start of her career in 1915. She had wanted to challenge convention, to push the boundaries, often building on her political instincts, as she had told The New Yorker in 1948. Books on subjects such as those dealt with by African-American writers or war reporters or audacious political philosophers such as Beauvoir seemed important to her, even necessary, and she was determined to keep pushing.

  * * *

  While the country was abuzz with The Second Sex, Knopf released what would prove to be the Polish writer and Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz’s strongest, bravest nonfiction. The Captive Mind explored the intellectual conflicts faced by people living under any type of totalitarianism, left or right, communism or Nazism. A critical success, the book drew commentators from the top ranks: Stephen Spender called it “a masterpiece … that in a hundred years” will be read as a “passionate apologia” for peace. Years after its publication, Jerzy Kosiński called it “a faultlessly perceptive analysis of the moral and historical dilemma we all face … as timely today as when it was first written.”36 Buoyed by the attention that The Captive Mind received, Blanche, when she returned to Paris in July, wrote Alfred on Ritz stationery, “Darling: I miss you much more than ever before and can’t wait until the 11th Aout when you arrive: It is better with you than without you anywhere!”37 The Knopfs, in the middle of one of their innumerable swings in the marriage, could even consider returning to the beginning of their relationship: four days later Blanche wrote Alfred again, discussing the chance to establish a “single home and social life.”38 Unfortunately, they would never create the marital household Blanche now decided that, for a few hours, she wanted.

  At the end of 1953, they did spend several weeks together in Los Angeles. Blanche saw several of her authors before joining Alfred to visit Edwin and Mildred, at whose home they met many of the couple’s movie friends. Edwin was “sitting pretty,” as he put it, having produced the award-winning musical Lili that year, and Blanche, glad for the change of pace, happily watched the film, starring Leslie Caron, Mel Ferr
er, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, in Edwin and Mildred’s screening room. When Mildred gave a dinner party for Alfred and Blanche along with “lots of Hollywood stars,” she asked her brother-in-law whom he would like to sit next to. Alfred answered, “You know there is only one woman in the world for me.” As Mildred had surmised years before, “It’s the old story: he couldn’t live with her, he couldn’t live without her.”39

  But Blanche found Alfred’s love too capricious. When she was at Purchase, she would often beseech him to throw more logs onto the fire in the paneled family room. He’d refuse, saying the temperature was fine, although he realized that she had no body fat. This would go on until Alfred relented and turned up the heat, before putting on a bathing suit.40 In general, Alfred mocked Blanche more mercilessly than ever, often in front of others at the office, to the point of critiquing the way she folded the bills in her wallet or the style in which she had one of the dogs clipped. Nothing seemed beyond reproach.

  Nonetheless, that spring the Knopfs did manage to pay their respects to Dorothy Hergesheimer, whose husband, Joseph, the popular Knopf writer of the twenties and early thirties, had died in April in Cape May County, New Jersey. A few months later, Blanche and Alfred agreed to fly to France together but to go their own ways once abroad, Blanche to southern France with Jenny, and Alfred with the wine connoisseur Alexis Lichine to Châteauneuf-du-Pape, six miles from Avignon and close to Provence. Alfred had engaged Lichine to tour the French vineyards with him and teach him “all about red Rhone vines.” From a room next to Alfred’s, through what Lichine would later tactfully call the thin walls of their five-star hotel, the wine expert could hear Alfred shouting on the phone at Blanche, “forcing her to join them though she didn’t want to.”41