In early February, Alfred went fishing in Chile, with people he’d met on the trip to South America a few months earlier. Blanche wrote him, “I cannot tell you how much I look forward to the 19th of February,” when he would be home. The office was “humming along,” she assured him. She described how “elegant” “the Monsieur” looked, and how vain, having been “clipped yesterday.” She added, “I still do not mention your name or he goes quite mad.”42 Blanche was clearly in one of the spousal romantic moments she’d invoked from the beginning of their marriage, whenever she was anticipating rather than actually being with Alfred.
While Alfred was away, Blanche’s driver, a necessity these days, was squiring her around town in Alfred’s Rolls-Royce. “It has been heaven to have it here,” she told her husband. She closed with news of Julia Child’s cookbook: twelve thousand copies had been sold since its October release, and it was now “being displayed at the Brasserie along with Larousse’s GASTRONOMIQUE.”43
“You may get this letter and you may not but it goes with my love, with Monsieur’s licks, and with the whole office’s missing you. Please take care of yourself on this last lap and arrive safely and well. Devotedly☺.”44 She closed her note with a revivified smiley face; Van Vechten had used them in the twenties and Blanche had occasionally resurrected them in the forties.
That May, Blanche was strong enough to attend a publishers’ conference in Barcelona, arriving home in time to receive an honorary doctor of letters from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—along with the drama critic Brooks Atkinson. Unlike in previous years when she worked hard to conceal her physical condition, Blanche was now forthright about her infirmities, especially the slow-to-heal broken hip from months earlier. After the celebration was over, she wrote the officials who had handled her trip that she had enjoyed not only the event itself but also the generous and delicate treatment the college staff had extended to her. As usual, she incorporated the larger field of books into her closing, recalling her discussion with the vice president of Sartre’s Search for a Method (Questions de Méthode) that she would be publishing, then adding that she was sending to the college president, with whom she’d discussed the importance of reading, selections she thought he would enjoy: Training Your Own Dog, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run and his book of short stories Pigeon Feathers. Though only thirty, Updike was, in Blanche’s opinion, brilliant.45
In late summer, before Blanche left for Europe, she and Alfred drove to Weston, Connecticut, to have lunch with John Hersey and his second wife, Barbara, whom Hersey had married in 1958, months after divorcing Frances Ann. Barbara, the ex-wife of the cartoonist Charles Addams and allegedly the model for Morticia Addams, was even more fun than Frances Ann. Both Knopfs were nonetheless taken aback by the antics of the Herseys’ young toddler, who, in Barbara’s bra and panties, sashayed with her nanny down the stairs to the dining room. Hersey recalled the incident later for the shock he saw on his guests’ faces, though he himself was laughing. But unlike Alfred, who became a mossback whenever sexual jokes were made, Blanche was simply taken aback.46
Abroad in September, Blanche once again revealed the occasional affection that still underpinned her difficult marriage to Alfred. Writing from London, she marked her letter “Personal” and sent it to Purchase, rather than to the office as she typically did: “Ridiculous that at our ages we (or I?) should have discovered how much we care—perhaps we were too proud, or whatever we were before and then perhaps it is better so but I do care and deeply and seldom enjoyed anything as much as our being together much as I think I dislike packing and unpacking! You were, are, wonderful to me!… I miss you terribly … All my love and thanks for us.”47
24
NO MORE DEALS
IN WASHINGTON, just before Langston Hughes took part in the first national poetry festival in the United States, with a reception at the White House hosted by Mrs. Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted.1 On October 15, 1962, the United States, using spy planes, had discovered that the Soviets were building medium-range missile sites in Cuba. ExComm, an executive committee formed by President Kennedy, decided on a naval quarantine until the complete removal of the missiles was ensured. For the next nine days, the two superpowers seemed to be on the brink of nuclear war, with the United States military on the highest alert since World War II.
When the United States appeared serious about invading Cuba, the Soviets presented a proposal that seemed acceptable—but the following day Khrushchev decided it should include additional concessions from the Americans, including eliminating U.S. missile bases in Turkey. More tension ensued, until Kennedy and his advisers agreed to dismantle the missile sites, though Turkey was an important NATO member—but at a later date, in order to prevent the United States ally from feeling shabbily treated. Kennedy called off the blockade after all the weapons were removed, and in April 1963 the remaining American missiles in Turkey were eradicated.
The crisis was hardly resolved before Blanche was trying to commission a book about the near catastrophe, though with little success. Journalists, including Scotty Reston, were ruminating about the Kennedy administration and its tense political scene but weren’t ready to commit to print ironclad conclusions. John Hersey, whom she’d counted on, was writing about civil rights these days and declared himself done with the subject of war, which nonetheless remained a major concern of mid-century literature. Even the novel Blanche wanted from Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means, used V-E and V-J Days in London as one of its themes. Blanche wrote to Alfred: “I am reading probably the best book I have read in a great many years, Richard Hughes’ The Fox in the Attic and am halfway through and cannot wait to get back to it. There is not a word wasted so that it is slow-going and brilliant and probably the best picture of post–first war Germany that has been written.”2 Harper & Row published it after its British appearance, implying Knopf’s London scouts had been slow on the uptake—or that Harper & Row was willing to spend more money to acquire it. Blanche still disliked being beaten by other publishers a step ahead of Knopf in signing a book, but even now her house was known not only for its quality but for its frugality as well.
In November 1962, having healed enough physically and secure that war had been averted, Blanche boarded her usual flight, TWA 830, to Paris. Though Knopf now employed at least six editors who acquired books from home and abroad, Blanche remained Knopf’s primary scout overseas, even with her diminished stamina. Back in New York in time to welcome 1963 with her famous eggnog, Blanche saw her marital life take another downturn, the reason unclear. The couple’s peace was always frangible, exhausted before it even registered. Predictably, Blanche turned to her work for solace: at last the third and final volume of her South American acquisition from twenty years ago was coming to market.
On January 1, 1963, Harriet de Onís’s beautifully subtle translation of Gilberto Freyre’s Sobrados e Mucambos (The Mansions and the Shanties: The Making of Modern Brazil) was published. But Blanche continued to be acquisitive. She wrote to Scotty Reston that his newspaper radio program on WQXR was “always better” than the others. “No one is saying what needs to be said more clearly and simply than you.” Please write us a book, she implored him. Reston replied that after Washington stopped getting itself into trouble he would consider such a project.3
The immediate publishing coup was Muriel Spark’s decision to move to Knopf. On January 9 Blanche found out that Knopf had outbid Lippincott for The Girls of Slender Means, as well as a future novel, The Mandelbaum Gate. Through Elizabeth Bowen, Blanche had been working to get the novelist since 1961, when Spark published The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in The New Yorker. Though the Knopf staff came to despise working with the prickly woman—Bill Koshland remembered how “terribly bitchy” Muriel was—Blanche drew close to her, the two strong women closing ranks. They became so comfortable with each other that Blanche cajoled Muriel to lose weight and pay more attention to her appearan
ce, insisting that it was important for a writer to look “put together” for her public. Eventually, Muriel took her counsel and “transformed” her looks, to the surprise of Knopf’s staff.4
Meanwhile, Spark herself was shocked at her friend’s deterioration. At brunch, Blanche would sometimes pour coffee onto the table, her inability to make out shapes progressing monthly.5 Pat recalled his mother holding letters upside down in the office even before he left Knopf, “but nobody said a word. [Often] she’d start to pour the coffee and I’d grab the pot, because it wasn’t going into the cup, [and] she didn’t interfere.”6 Now Blanche would pick up her dog, Monsieur, thinking it was her fashionable cabbage-shaped purse, and after realizing her mistake, quickly murmur, “Mon petit chou.”7 Her voice compensated somewhat for her lack of sight. More than twenty years after her death, the Knopf editor Stanley Kauffmann would remember Blanche’s voice: “Oh, a pleasure to experience, low and warm, so much more attractive than his [Alfred’s].”8
Because of Alfred’s interest in amateur photography (another mark of a gentleman of leisure, he told Pete Lemay, along with a “wine cellar, honorary degrees, and self-education in music and conservation”), the last years of Blanche’s life are well documented visually.9 Alfred was so proud of his photography that he “ordered” Pete to get his pictures into a national magazine. But the two-page spread that ran in Life allowed an “error” to slip through. According to Life, all Knopf writers were under Alfred’s wing. In an “icy rage,” Blanche called Pete into her office. Half the writers were not “his” but “hers,” she made clear, after throwing the magazine across the room. From now on, she informed him, there was a moratorium on her husband’s turning his camera on her or her authors without her permission.10
Pete had become a good friend to both Knopfs, a substitute in part for the impartial voice they lost when Mencken died and Van Vechten began his precipitous decline. (Around this time, the photographer Richard Avedon shot a portrait of Carl and Langston Hughes, with Carl’s arms around his friend, and though both men had aged, Carl looked battered.) In spite of Alfred’s fondness, he was often hard for Pete to take, and he understood why Dorothy Lemay said that Alfred was the rudest man she’d ever met.
In contrast, Pete never forgot how when he introduced his wife, Blanche showed genuine pleasure at meeting her. The Lemays were out shopping and ran into Blanche, looking into a store window. Smiling and repeating Dorothy’s name, Blanche told her that “Elizabeth Bowen, who ordinarily detests children, tells me you have the most enchanting boy and girl she’s ever seen.”11 Pete grew to love Blanche, even though he was acutely aware of “the quixotic and sometimes ridiculous defenses she erected against humiliation and the pain that constantly assailed her.”12
* * *
In March 1963, Blanche wrote Muriel Spark that she’d just been in a “period piece place” in Arizona for several weeks, a trip she had hated but she made for Alfred, and which she’d tell her new author about when she saw her in September.13 She sent separately a letter from Monsieur, thanking “Miss Spark” lavishly for the silver pillbox from Birmingham, England, that the dog used daily. After speculating on the world a hundred years hence, Blanche suggested, half seriously, that dogs might even read by then. For now, Monsieur especially appreciated the gift because his “mama” had been going out too often at night to suit him, and Muriel’s present reminded him that he was loved. Monsieur closed with “Miss Spark, I hope you will come to see us very soon. My mameing [sic] I know loves you dearly and thinks you very grand and I do, too, and would like to give you a lick for his surprise.” Then, over a stamped paw print, the signature read, “Your small friend.”14
Blanche worked closely with Spark to ensure The Girls of Slender Means was ready for early-fall publication. In May, she wrote that she was thrilled the author was coming to the States, where Knopf would “[create] some fun” for her on publication day. In a few weeks the staff would be holding their “big Sales meeting … talking about The Girls of Slender Means with joy.”15 Whatever her own travels, Blanche stressed, Muriel must stay in New York until the publisher returned from abroad in September. But the early-autumn trip was canceled when Blanche was hospitalized, doubled over once again with abdominal pain.
Alfred brought his brother, Edwin, up to date on September 20 about her progress at Lenox Hill, where she was “doing well”—though more surgery was probably ahead to deal with the adhesions from prior operations. “Blanche is going to require a lot of attention, and I still have to play the thing by ear. Up to now her morale has been surprisingly good, but as you say, ‘There are limits.’”16 She would be home soon, her rapid recovery allowing Alfred to take his trip to California and see Edwin as planned. Still, he cautioned, one never knew. In the meantime, Blanche was focused on Muriel’s novel.
Book Week published the first American review of The Girls of Slender Means, lauding its “freedom from cant” and lamenting the novel’s brevity, the reviewer wanting more pages from “such a talent.” In the character-driven story set in the period between the end of the war in Europe and the one in the Pacific, forty girls are forced to live away from home in a lowly institution. “Ominous” to some critics, the author tortured her characters as a “cat playing with a bird,” allowing them “moments of hope only to pounce on them.” The journalist Virgilia Peterson (who had told Pete Lemay, “At least I didn’t have a nervous breakdown after my affair with Stokowski the way Blanche did”) claimed that “admirers of Miss Spark’s last and brilliant little tale, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, may find The Girls of Slender Means more oblique and ambiguous” but more impressive as a result.17 Peterson applauded the sharp edge of Spark’s fiction, quoting her: “‘Few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenuous, more movingly lovely, and as it might happen, more savage than the girls of slender means.’”18
Back at Lenox Hill, Blanche discovered that her pain wasn’t from adhesions after all: she had cancer in her abdomen and liver. Told she had two years to live, she forbade Alfred to tell anyone but a few confidants. Although she didn’t believe that a stricken individual was responsible for her disease, as some did, she still belonged to a generation that thought there was something shameful about cancer. Alfred agreed to do as she wished.
Dr. Herman Tarnower, later of Scarsdale Diet fame, claimed to have ordered the biopsy that first identified Blanche’s abdominal tumor. Tarnower, who lived in the house next to the Knopfs’ in Purchase, had initially refused to give the results to Blanche; he assumed in such instances the patient should be told nothing. Alfred had persuaded his friend otherwise, however, telling him he’d shatter Blanche’s confidence in him if he withheld the truth. In a late-life interview, Alfred would recall that “she knew anyway. They [the doctors] just had her all wrong.”19 Ultimately, it was Alfred, not Tarnower, who gave her the news, which she said she’d already guessed.
Tarnower surgically removed as much of the tumors as he could, and he and Blanche devised a schedule for heavy radiation that she would receive many months later. He remembered her as fatalistic but uncomplaining. She told Alfred she planned to continue working to the end. Office stalwarts such as Eleanor French had to be told the truth, she agreed, so they could take her to medical appointments.
Receiving an explanation for her recent years of chronic pain allowed Blanche an odd sense of peace. In addition to her publishing work, she drew up seventeen pages of end-of-life documents, including a will and instructions for her funeral. Telling Joe Lesser the news after pledging him to secrecy, she asked for his help in “making the next two years the best of Alfred’s life.”20 She decided to buy a co-op at the Sherry-Netherland, where she and Alfred could live together (she didn’t sell her apartment), and she set about hiring architects to make the necessary renovations.
That her work proceeded unabated was the result of a determined effort to make her life seem like “business as usual”—to herself as well as to those around her. She would have assistants
with her at every turn, packing her bags, getting her to airports and hotels, ordering her food, or sitting beside her, taking notes during interviews with authors.
After Blanche left the hospital, Alfred wrote their daughter-in-law, Alice, that though Blanche would miss Thanksgiving this year, late November would be a good time for the Knopfs to celebrate Christmas in Westport, with Pat and his family. Alfred couldn’t be sure Blanche would be back from France by then, but they could hope. Clearly, Alfred was laying the groundwork for Blanche to miss a dreaded family gathering.
Pat’s invitations to Westport were rare, and family interactions remained stiff. Blanche was still a proud woman, and, feeling unwelcome in her son’s life, she must have refused to yield at all in their fraught relationship. Soon after President Kennedy was shot in Dallas on November 22, she left for Paris, where she would process the tragedy with friends rather than family.
Upon her return, she was thrilled when Alfred appeared at the airport with Monsieur to greet her. Blanche wrote Jenny Bradley not about seeing her grandchildren, but about her dog, as if he were her child: “Alfred brought him to Idlewild which was a surprise and a wonderful one. He [Monsieur] was enchanting … really very gay and great fun.” Just as the Knopfs had bonded over their impossible but lovable bloodhounds, so again they had come together through their affection for the seven-pound terrier. From abroad she had written elaborate instructions for his care, the letters signed with the same paw print she’d used on Muriel Spark’s thank-you letter. In Paris, worried about Monsieur’s health, Blanche had cabled Eleanor French, suggesting she confer with another assistant about the shape his “cigars” were now taking.
The Lady with the Borzoi Page 31
