For weeks, along with Blanche’s live-in maid, Cecile, who had returned from an early retirement to take care of Blanche, Alfred had been staying at the Fifty-Fifth Street apartment, reading to his wife for hours at a time. As if reliving his childhood family car trips, he chose an old favorite, Sherlock Holmes, and went through as many tales as necessary until she fell asleep. At some point he even wrote poetry for her, though Pete Lemay remembers her responding with the cryptic utterance that “it’s much too late.”56 When Alfred had to go to Boston for a day or so, Joe Lesser came to her apartment in his stead. “There was no question that she expected to recover from this bout of illness,” he would tell Susan Sheehan. “We went over architectural and design blueprints for the new apartment she was planning. That Friday night we just sat and talked over the plans and its costs,” Lesser assuring her there was plenty of money to do whatever she wanted. Cecile, hinting that it was time to go, excused herself and went to her basement bedroom, taking the latest Yorkie with her. Reluctantly, Joe departed, leaving Blanche alone.57
Just then Muriel Spark called from East Hampton. She had noticed a “celestial light” and realized that her “hotel room was right overhanging the sea and you could hear the roar of the waves … I said to her, ‘Blanche, can you hear the sea?’ She said, ‘No, but I’d like to,’ so I put the telephone receiver out of the window for her to hear the waves and then she said, ‘Yes, now I catch the sound of the sea.’”58
* * *
The next morning, June 4, when Blanche didn’t respond to Cecile’s typically soft tap on the door, the maid became alarmed. Knocking louder and still getting no response, she called Eleanor French rather than enter the room herself. When Eleanor arrived, she found her longtime employer unresponsive and knew that Blanche was dead. She had been in “terrible pain” the day before, causing her to swear that she was going to give her doctor an ultimatum: he had to do something or she was going to take matters into her own hands. But the doctor had replied that he could do nothing more. Eleanor assumed Blanche had committed suicide—when she and perhaps Alfred knew he would not be there to suffer as he had at his mother’s death.59
Muriel Spark always said the sounds of the waves were the last thing her friend heard.60
Alfred and Herman Tarnower arrived together later that morning, Pat and Joseph Lesser before them. When Pat got there, Lesser made sure he could be alone with his mother. For two hours Pat sat by her side, sobbing. What Blanche had long wanted, evidence that her son loved her, had come, but too late. When Alfred walked in, he ignored Pat and immediately began making the funeral arrangements. Tarnower didn’t want to be a witness for the death certificate, since the empty bottle of pain pills by her bed suggested Blanche might have hastened her end. Alfred begged him: otherwise, Blanche would be sent to the morgue. Reluctantly, Tarnower signed the document and the body was taken to Frank E. Campbell, the funeral home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where Blanche had gone to pay her respects to George Gershwin almost thirty years before.
The following Tuesday, June 7, on the way to the funeral, with Pete Lemay serving as Alfred’s companion, their limousine ran out of gas, and Alfred “went crazy” while the driver refueled.61 Otherwise, the publisher tended to business papers during the short trip to Campbell’s, with Pat and his family in the following car. For his mother’s burial clothes, her son had selected the Balenciaga evening gown she’d worn to the Knopfs’ fiftieth-anniversary celebration two months earlier. Though Blanche had specified that “my body shall be cremated and the ashes dispersed and that there shall be no religious or other funeral services of any kind,” she had failed to indicate her final dress.62
Ignoring her directive, Alfred held an 11:30 ceremony where he alone spoke, briefly, about his wife’s valor and strength. He had arranged for a Juilliard ensemble, dressed in black and white, to play a twenty-minute Haydn string quartet. Jason Epstein would remember the “stage banked with camellias.”63 Pat insisted they were white carnations, and that his father whispered to him: “They cost me $500.00.”64
Pete Lemay still gets upset remembering how Bennett and Phyllis Cerf chattered throughout the half-hour service at Campbell’s—“and not quietly”—while Peggy Cullman complained of the dead woman’s nerve in forcing them to sit for thirty minutes in the summer heat (though the day’s newspapers report pleasant weather).65 The family (and Pete) then drove to the crematorium. Talking to Lemay twenty years later, Pat said, “Terrible thing to be cremated in [that dress]. It was a beautiful thing: taffeta in red and black.”
Pat would tell Peter Prescott that he resented, even protested, his father’s publication of encomia upon Blanche’s death: Alfred had “never given her recognition in her time.”66
Hundreds of tributes poured in, from all over the world, with Elizabeth Bowen’s quiet observation summing them up: “I can’t grasp that Blanche is not in this world anymore.” At another occasion a few years earlier, Bowen had praised her friend as the “most extraordinary person in that she never asks a single question which is hurtful or improper to the person of creative imagination.” She had gone on to speak of Blanche’s ability to further a novelist’s faith in herself, while never “intruding.” She had “always given one that feeling of an absolute and reticent understanding.”67
Even the staff at the Paris Ritz sent personal condolences, in the form of a letter. John Hersey wrote:
Barbara and I talk about Blanche every day—remembering small things but always remembering the great thing, her remarkable courage. I guess I had known for a long time that she must be having pain, but I never heard a word on the subject, never a sigh from her lips. She always wanted to talk about the latest thing, whatever it might be, and about my concerns. I was moved by it each time I saw her, and I am moved by it now.68
Knopf’s Sidney Jacobs, head of production and an employee since 1928, stressed her kindness: “I shall never forget how Blanche appeared suddenly in Munich one grim day in June 1945—long before American civilians were allowed into the city. She had charmed two young Army Air Force colonels into flying her from Paris so that she could say ‘Hello, Jake’ and dispel my loneliness and make me believe that home really existed.” “She brought so much elegance and style into publishing and into life, and we are all impoverished by her death,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Eric Sevareid telegraphed, “This is very sad news for a lot of us [stop] It makes me realize again how much Blanche did for me and so many writing friends of mine.” William Shirer said that “it was Blanche who took Berlin Diary, with an advance which shook the House of Knopf and began to shake me out of journalism and into writing books. I shall never forget the confidence she had in me from the very beginning. It gave me a start in a new life.” Jason Epstein concluded that “in one way especially her loss seems to me catastrophic … Blanche stood for a kind of publishing which we shall never see again.”69
EPILOGUE
NINE MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE’S DEATH Alfred would marry Helen Hedrick, whose novel The Blood Remembers had been published by Knopf in 1941. The friendly northwestern woman was, everybody said, as different from Blanche as anyone could be. “Helen knows how to manage me,” Alfred explained to others. “Blanche never did.”1 But Alfred’s friend, the philanthropist W. H. “Ping” Ferry (who delighted in wearing even gaudier pink shirts and polka-dot ties than the publisher), was shocked at how Alfred spoke to Helen. Though Ping considered himself an “intellectual provocateur in the Swiftian tradition,” he found Alfred’s manner to his wife intolerable: “He was rude and dismissive … and told her to go away when we were talking in the living room. He would verbally abuse Helen,” he recalled.2
Letters from Helen to Pat and his children are warm. Yet the Knopfs’ son would, years later, complain bitterly to Pete Lemay that just like his mother, his stepmother had “ignored his children throughout her marriage to Alfred,” and that after Alfred’s funeral, his second wife had “left to go back West immediately, Alfred’s entire estate h
ers. She didn’t even stop to say goodbye,” apparently in a hurry to return to her four grown children and eleven grandchildren. “Qu’est-ce que tu veux? C’est la vie,” Blanche would have said in the language she loved. Life wasn’t fair, everybody knew that. On October 1, 2015, Knopf celebrated its one hundredth anniversary, at the New York Public Library.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
AAK Alfred A. Knopf.
AAK notes Notes of Alfred A. Knopf. Numbered by later (erratic) documentation as well as Alfred Knopf’s original pagination.
AP Private collection of Anne Prescott, including the private collection of papers and recordings of Peter Prescott. Many of the files in the Anne Prescott archives have been listed here by their original cataloging titles.
BWK Blanche Wolf Knopf.
BWK notes Notes of Blanche Wolf Knopf.
HRC Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Records.
POP Alfred A. Knopf, ed. Portrait of a Publisher 1915–1965, vol. 1, Reminiscences and Reflections by Alfred A. Knopf; vol. 2, Alfred A. Knopf and the Borzoi Imprint: Recollections and Appreciations (New York: Typophiles, 1965).
SS Private collection of Susan Sheehan.
INTRODUCTION
1. Gregory R. Suriano, ed., Gershwin in His Time: A Biographical Scrapbook, 1919–1937 (New York: Gramercy Books, 1998), 30; and Paul Boyer, “Knopf, Blanche Wolf,” in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986), 401.
2. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 2, The Expansion of an Industry, 1865–1919 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1975), 3.
3. Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2010), 4 (speaking of Rome, centuries earlier); and Susan Hertog, Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson, New Women in Search of Love and Power (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), book jacket.
4. AAK notes, chap. 6, 150, HRC.
5. Richard Hofstadter, in POP, vol. 2, 215.
6. Arnold Rampersad, e-mail to the author, April 7, 2014.
7. AAK, interviewed by Susan Sheehan, July 27, 1973, AP.
8. AAK, interviewed by Susan Sheehan, July 8, 1974, AP.
9. Drew Dudley Landmark Decisions, AP.
10. Joseph Epstein, e-mail to the author, October 10, 2012.
11. Harding Lemay, e-mail to the author, April 5, 2012.
1. HUNGRY FOR ADVENTURE
1. BWK’s account of her trip to London, 1943, AP.
2. “Blanche’s European Trips: 1943, 1948,” AP.
3. Special thanks to David Smith, retired reference librarian at the New York Public Library, for this information.
4. Robert Josephy, interviewed by Peter Prescott, n.d., AP.
5. Lecture given by Peter Prescott, AP.
6. Rita Goodman Bodenheimer, interviewed by Susan Sheehan, in “Blanche Before Marriage,” 1970s, AP.
7. “Failure of Cattle Exporters,” The New York Times, September 25, 1877.
8. Ibid.
9. Samuels made his fortune back at a tragic cost: in early 1902 he took out insurance on a mortgage of $31,000 (equal to $900,000 today), before dying a few months later. “Assignments of Mortgages,” The New York Times, June 28, 1902.
10. “Blanche-2, ‘Three Alice,’” n.d., SS, AP.
11. Helene Fraenkel, interviewed by Susan Sheehan, n.d., AP. Alfred remembered Blanche as being close to her mother.
12. “Blanche-2, ‘Three Alice,’” n.d., SS, AP.
13. Amy Root Clements, “Inventing the Borzoi: Alfred and Blanche Knopf and the Rhetoric of Prestige in Modern American Book Publishing” (doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2010), 31.
14. Elsie Alsberg, interviewed by Susan Sheehan, in “Blanche Before Marriage,” 1970s, AP.
15. “Courting Blanche,” Mem. T4—122: April 4 or 16, SS, AP.
16. Peter Prescott, “Blanche-2, ‘Three Alfred,’” n.d., AP.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Geoffrey Hellman, in POP, vol. 2, 53.
20. BWK notes, n.p., AP.
21. Ibid.
22. Norma Loeb Mark, interviewed by Peter Prescott, n.d., AP.
23. Peter Prescott, “Biography of Alfred Knopf” (working paper), chap. 1, AP.
24. Ibid., 14; and Wendy Knopf, letter to Peter Prescott, April 15, 1993, recalling what Helen Knopf told her.
25. AAK notes, 33, HRC; also H. L. Mencken letter to BWK, April 24, 1915, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, H. L. Mencken Collection.
26. AAK notes, n.p., HRC.
27. AAK notes, 17, HRC.
28. Lecture given by Peter Prescott, AP.
29. AAK notes, 17, HRC.
30. “Infidelity,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, February 9, 1897; The Commercial Tribune, February 9, 1897; “Atoned,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, February 17, 1897.
31. “Atoned.”
32. “Infidelity.”
33. The Commercial Tribune, February 9, 1897.
34. “Atoned.”
35. Brooklyn Sunday Eagle, February 14, 1897. Quotations in the following two paragraphs are from this source.
2. THE BOOK LOVERS
1. AAK notes, chap. 3; “Mildred MK,” SS, HRC: “Blanche stipulated Alfred had to use her in the firm.”
2. Charles Emmerson, 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 171.
3. AAK notes, “Boyhood,” n.p., HRC.
4. Ibid.
5. BWK, letter to AAK, December 22, 1913, AP.
6. AAK notes, n.p., AP.
7. AAK notes, March 6, 1915, 109, HRC.
8. BWK, letter to AAK, June 3, 1914, AP.
9. BWK, letters to AAK, December 22, 1913, and November 15, 1914, AP.
10. BWK notes, n.p., AP.
11. BWK notes, n.p., AP.
12. “Know Your Type: Cheltenham,” idsgn (blog), February 3, 2010, idsgn.org/posts/know-your-type-cheltenham.
13. These included Elmer Adler, W. A. Dwiggins, and, a short while later, Bruce Rogers, George Salter, Carl Hertzog, and Vincent Torre.
14. BWK notes, n.p., AP.
15. The Borzoi Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1966), HRC.
16. John J. Mullen, interviewed by Susan Sheehan, April 23, 1975, AP.
17. Amy Root Clements, The Art of Prestige: The Formative Years at Knopf, 1915–1929 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 69.
18. Wilmarth Lewis, interviewed by Peter Prescott, n.d., AP.
19. BWK notes, n.p., AP.
20. BWK notes, n.p., AP.
21. The New York Times, April 5, 1916, AP.
22. AAK notes, chap. 6, 143, HRC.
23. BWK notes, n.p., AP.
24. AAK notes, 145, AP.
25. Ibid., 144.
26. Ibid., 143.
27. Jeff Kennedy, “A History of the Provincetown Playhouse,” provincetownplayhouse.com/history.html.
28. In 1959, Hudson’s novel was turned into a movie with Audrey Hepburn, Anthony Perkins, and Lee J. Cobb.
29. Marian Skedgell letter to Peter Prescott, July 14, 1987, AP; and Geoffrey Hellman, in POP, vol. 1, 53.
30. AAK notes, n.p., HRC.
31. The offerings included James Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan; Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni; Théophile Gautier, A Romantic in Spain; Martin A. S. Holme, Sir Walter Raleigh; Francisco de Quevedo, Pablo de Segovia; Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Sardonic Tales; Frederick Ro
lfe, Hadrian the Seventh; Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker), Max Havelaar; The Letters of Abelard and Heloise; Haldane Macfall, Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer; Stendhal, The Life of Henri Brulard; Andrew Kippis, Captain Cook’s Voyages; Morley Roberts, Rachel Marr; Marmaduke Pickthall, Said the Fisherman; Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, The Diaboliques; Richard Garnett, The Twilight of the Gods; and James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
32. Tape 19, “Publicity—Early Days,” SS, AP.
33. Charles Dellheim, “A Fragment of a Heart in the Knopf Archives,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 45, no. 45 (July 16, 1999): B4.
34. Bruce Kellner, ed., Letters of Carl Van Vechten (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 3–11.
35. H. L. Mencken, letter to BWK, December 10, 1921, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, H. L. Mencken Collection.
36. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, 4.11, dated August 28, 1917, HRC.
37. BWK, telegram to AAK, February 5, 1917, AP.
38. Death certificate for W. Julius Wolf, January 6, 1917, file no. 938, Manhattan W410.
39. Elsie Alsberg, interviewed by Susan Sheehan, in “BWK Child/Colin interview,” n.d., AP.
40. Ibid.
41. AAK notes, 15, AP.
42. BWK, letter to AAK, May 19, 1918, AP.
43. The influenza pandemic by the end of 1918 had a death toll in New York City alone of 12,500.
44. Jill Lepore, The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 118–23.
The Lady with the Borzoi Page 33
