The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  Feeling uncomfortable around such know-it-alls, as he saw them, Alfred told Blanche they were a bunch of poseurs—their art, except for Eastman’s, lightweight. Many critics took the same view, one writing in Harper’s Weekly, for instance, that there were “still laws in art as in physics … If your stomach revolts against this rubbish it is because it is not fit for human food.”2 Van Gogh, Rodin, and Matisse were basically unskilled or mentally ill, such detractors maintained. Blanche was uneasy at the censure the Armory Show inspired, sensing it was akin to how books were censored in her world, the world of words. But she remained silent, believing that she lacked the education and experience to make such judgments. Her instincts were right, however: American art would change forever after the exhibition.

  For a while, the closest the couple would get to the avant-garde was their reading of a well-respected progressive novel, Henry Sydnor Harrison’s V.V.’s Eyes, an early endorsement of women’s and workmen’s rights. Soon Alfred began calling Blanche “VV,” for the book’s broad-minded male physician with famously piercing blue-gray eyes—the doctor’s sympathy for women making him appear advanced. Alfred would use “VV” as Blanche’s nickname erratically throughout their lives, an acknowledgment of the gulf between his wife’s independence and the world of the traditional Victorian housewife that had been left behind.

  For her part—and in place of his school nickname, “Knoppie”—Blanche was regularly calling Alfred “Reuben,” inspired by a popular song of the day, “Reuben and Rachel,” originally published in 1871 and resurrected during World War I.3 A children’s song recounting a gentle battle of the sexes, its new, slightly altered opening line, “Reuben, Reuben, I’ve been thinking,” was ready-made for Blanche’s coquetry. Her suggestive notes to her suitor accelerated, proper yet more intimate by the month. Coyly rejecting Alfred’s invitations to spend the weekend in Lawrence, she also found ways to signal that “this was the man she wanted.”4 At the end of 1913, she sent him a message that was clearly a flirtation: “Funny thing, this morning, when I was still in a very sleepy state I reached out my hand for a letter”; she was disappointed to find she’d been dreaming.5

  To Blanche, her head filled with literature, Alfred was a glamorous suitor—and he was interested in her, despite all that she needed to learn.

  Pleased, she noticed how he sought to impress her, taking her the next summer to an intercollegiate rowing regatta on the Hudson, where he could boast of Columbia University’s standing. He would brag about running track in college: “My interest lasted a long time, and before we were married Blanche and I went frequently to the New York Athletic Club Games at Travers Island and to the Pennsylvania Relays at Philadelphia.” The couple also enjoyed attending polo matches at Garden City, where they sat close to each other on the grass, Blanche packing the picnic lunch and Alfred explaining how the game worked.6

  As an old man, Alfred would recollect their courtship as a series of affectionate moments, even calling their first years “romantic”: “I would walk under her windows at night and whistle the Scheherazade. A sort of signal. She wouldn’t come out. Just to know I was there.”7 In the middle of 1914 she wrote him: “Words are—almost impossible for me but I want you to understand that I know [how much you are helping me] always, what a bully friend you are and sometime, perhaps, I can tell you better … how much you are appreciated.”8 Her parents, meanwhile, were getting nervous about the relationship’s obvious direction. The courtship progressed, and by the end of the year Blanche wrote her beau: “You are a bad child. I was reading after I spoke to you when suddenly it entered my head that you said your folks had gone to Woodmere for the day—so I asked information your number, she told me—and then I phoned to ask you here to dinner—and—you would return at six—they told me. Well, that is too late for Sunday dinner. I’m disappointed.”9

  Though they didn’t know the details, by 1915 the Wolfs had heard enough about what seemed Sam Knopf’s dark marital history and his unstable finances that they wanted their daughter to look elsewhere for love. They asked their son’s educated mother-in-law to take Blanche to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco that March; maybe its wonders would cause her to forget the insistent boyfriend at home. Though the trip did nothing to undermine Alfred Knopf, the exhibition was even more fantastic than promised by the newspaper accounts Blanche had devoured—especially its dazzling Tower of Jewels, a 435-foot construction covered with more than one hundred thousand “gems.” The three-quarter-inch to two-inch pieces of variously colored faceted glass were loosely suspended, shining day and night and swinging in the breeze, depending upon sunlight or a searchlight for illumination. The gem palace and the fair’s massive neutral-colored buildings, in shades of white and gray, seeded in Blanche a dual aesthetic she would exploit as she grew older: a love of extravagant color when she wanted to draw attention, usually as bold accents to her first love, arctic white, the color identified with her name and one that allowed her to stand out on her own terms. She came to love extremes that played off one another, teaming long-sleeved white cotton blouses from Woolworth’s with elaborate couture skirts by Elsa Schiaparelli, mixing fine gold bijoux with Seaman Schepps’s bold semiprecious stones.

  Eager to write to her beau about the fair’s splendors, Blanche nonetheless held to her promise not to contact Alfred while she was away. As soon as she returned in mid-1915, however, the two became engaged, keeping their wedding plans secret until early 1916: Blanche assumed that the less notice, the less fuss their relatives would make. Years later, in a short-lived effort to write a memoir, she would recall her efforts to dispel her parents’ reservations about their prospective son-in-law: “I spent a day with my mother in the automobile, going upstate for lunch and sold her.”10 Surely Bertha found the Knopfs’ domicile impressive, its garage with the chauffeur-driven car placed, Blanche would tell her, at Alfred’s disposal by the handsome patriarch, Sam. “Having been sold [my mother] proceeded to sell my father, which was easy for her. As we proceeded to become engaged, Mr. Knopf’s pap offered to give me stock amounting to $50,000 (which never was seen or heard of thereafter).”11

  * * *

  In spite of paper shortages in 1915, the war was proving a propitious moment to start a publishing house devoted to high-quality fiction and nonfiction, if only because older firms were curbing their production. Blanche and her fiancé worked tirelessly while most established publishers put their publication schedules on hold. Often she worked from home, while Alfred operated out of a small corner of his father’s nineteenth-floor office in the recently built neo-Renaissance Candler Building at 220 West Forty-Second Street.

  That spring, the couple began compiling their initial list, aimed at a fall release. They secured the French author Émile Augier’s Four Plays as their first book (for which they ordered a print run of 1,500 copies). That the plays were no longer under copyright outweighed their’ tedium and poor organization. A month or two later, Alfred took Blanche to meet his friend the newspaperman Henry Mencken, the “Sage of Baltimore,” who would help them launch Knopf. Blanche and Mencken took an instant liking to each other. Before the Knopfs returned to New York, “Menck” insisted that they allow him to ask his acquaintance, the well-regarded scholar Barrett Clark, to translate Four Plays. Henry knew that in order to have a chance, the French text would have to be rendered in first-rate English. (One of the earliest significant orders Knopf received was from the Chicago department store Marshall Field and Company, which ordered the Augier on Mencken’s recommendation alone.) Energized by the visit, Blanche and Alfred commissioned the well-respected Plimpton Press to bind the book in a vivid orange and blue. To embolden their imprint further they used the American typeface Cheltenham, inspired by the British Arts and Crafts movement and highly successful in the early 1900s, largely due to the variety of widths and styles it offered. A favorite among newspapers, it was adopted as a headline typeface by The New York Times around 1906.12

  Espec
ially since few Americans were interested in the obscure French dramas, such eye-catching design proved to be clever marketing. Soon the couple imported Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba: A Tale of the Cossacks, a Russian Romeo and Juliet that had been translated into English years before. For the novel’s cover, the Knopfs hired Claude Bragdon, a highly regarded architect and book designer, who stayed with the firm its first year, tracking down translators for the Russian books the company leaned toward. Americans were eager to read about Russia’s current unrest, and the new publishers knew how to seize the moment. Bragdon helped them gain an aesthetic reputation that quickly drew in other prestigious designers.13 England provided most of the domestic versions at first, but Blanche especially wanted Knopf to have its own slate of linguists and not depend on the motherland to translate for their developing company.

  Although most of the selections to land on that initial list in 1915 dealt with early Russian history and politics (little read then and soon forgotten), at least three (also obscure) books could be taken seriously by educated American readers: Taras Bulba; Stanislaw Przbyszewski’s Homo Sapiens, a novel; and Guy de Maupassant’s Yvette, a Novelette, and Ten Other Stories, translated by the Knopfs’ friend Mrs. John Galsworthy. If the Knopfs had few widely recognized authors, their careful selection of literature caused people to take notice. As their firm developed, they made a decision to value quality over quantity, and soon their average yearly publications would number around one hundred.

  By October they had rented, through Sam’s connections, their own thirty-by-ten-foot space on his floor, and they hired a “bookkeeper and errand boy and a stenographer” by the end of that first year. As Blanche recalled, “I worked very hard every day at this publishing business. We both did.”14 Still, “Could we possibly be more crowded?” she complained when they and the office help they paid seven dollars a week (roughly a fourth of what Alfred had made doing the same work at Doubleday) seemed always to be bumping into one another. Several months later, they added two more employees, still operating out of one room, for which they paid forty-five dollars a month in rent.15 Soon they would occupy a small row of offices with shipping rooms behind.16

  Blanche was pleased to get to the office on her own: almost five years earlier, Penn Station had opened, Grand Central following a few years later, already supplemented by the burgeoning subway lines. Organized by nature, she managed the fledgling business, signing contracts with writers she’d found or approved, checking out translators, deciding upon bindings (occasionally even using stained tops, “dyeing the thin upper edge of the pages in a color that complements the binding or stamping”), as well as choosing the printing company best suited to the book at hand.17 She quickly absorbed the rudiments of what would prove her life’s work. Studying typography, paper, ink, and the mechanics of printing presses, she found every facet of publishing fascinating. Above all, her love of reading was gratified by the hours she spent devouring manuscripts delivered by her growing network of writers.

  Blanche proved a superb editor of fiction and poetry: she listened to the rhythm of the language on the page and reacted to phrases, vocabulary, even punctuation, as she considered who might be right for Knopf. After deciding upon a manuscript, she typically turned it over to trained editors who would accomplish what she instinctively knew needed to be done. Although she would express her wishes to those editors without hesitation, she never seemed to feel educated enough to talk knowingly to scholars such as the Yale graduate Wilmarth Lewis, a rare-book collector published early by Knopf (he would later edit forty-eight volumes of Horace Walpole’s letters for Yale University Press). Those close to her, however, recognized her intelligence and sure literary sensibility. Lewis himself trained with the Knopfs for ten weeks in 1921 to learn the differences between commercial and academic publishing, and in 1922 he published his novel Tutors’ Lane with them. He found Blanche “terribly keen, full of business, very much on her toes.”18

  Alfred seemed to have inherited his father’s passion for sales. He discovered that he enjoyed selling books more than actually working on them—or even reading them, though he remained a history buff. From his various sales trips (at first confined to the Northeast), he irregularly sent work-related postcards and telegrams to Blanche while he traveled by train, befriending bookstore owners.

  From their initial meetings with Blanche and Alfred, even before the couple had started their business, both Joseph Hergesheimer, by 1914 a (temporarily) bestselling novelist, and H. L. Mencken wanted to have a role with the new publishing firm. Alfred had made his first contact with Hergesheimer the year before at the publisher Mitchell Kennerley’s office, where he worked briefly, and from which he managed to poach the author, who still owed Kennerley two books before Knopf could sign him. In late 1913, the ambitious newcomer had met Mencken at The Baltimore Sun, where the two men shared their enthusiasm for Hergesheimer and Joseph Conrad, one a chronicler of supercilious society and the other a creator of dark, layered tales. Mencken, keen and discerning and a well-established journalist, would become the Knopfs’ go-to man. His support would allow them to take editorial risks, including adding his acquaintance Carl Van Vechten to their roster, and he would serve as a confidant to Blanche, someone with whom she could speak honestly about the business and about Alfred as well.

  * * *

  Somehow the couple—or, more likely, Sam Knopf—found the time to announce their engagement in The New York Times in early January 1916 and to plan for a wedding held four months later. From the beginning, the event was fraught, mostly because of Sam Knopf’s overbearing nature. Blanche often felt harassed by Sam, who tried repeatedly to force his future daughter-in-law into a wedding spectacle that went against her grain. She preferred a small family affair or simply to elope at City Hall. Though she implored her fiancé for his support, Alfred said he couldn’t intervene. He could not risk upsetting his father.19

  Blanche recalled, “I wanted no formality, no ceremony … As I remember, I begged my family not to do it … and their saying ‘Anything you want,’ and I begged the very-very curiously correct [young Alfred], whom I admired, to stop the whole thing and just go off and get married. He was frightened and wouldn’t do it. I have never been particularly conventional, but he always is.”20

  Ultimately, Blanche acquiesced; how could she hold out, especially in view of the tragic story Alfred had recently confided about his mother? The story of Ida’s suicide had hardened her against Sam; he had behaved as a monster to someone Alfred had clearly loved. Afterward, to lighten the mood, Alfred had shared with Blanche what he assumed was an unrelated story, one he would repeat throughout his life. Laughing, he recounted how he’d become a “kleptomaniac” when he attended the Horace Mann School, where the wealthy young man had been expelled for stealing—books, of course. In his later passion for distant histories or tales of western mountain terrain, he ensured that he had stories other than his own to think about. His avoidance of his past moved Blanche, who was inspired by her enthusiasm for Freud and French philosophy. She knew all about avoidance, both in theory and in life, and she readily discerned the family trauma that Alfred sometimes claimed not to remember, though he had re-created it for Blanche in excruciating detail.

  * * *

  At 1:00 p.m. on April 4, 1916, at New York’s St. Regis hotel, in the second-floor suite overlooking Fifth Avenue (in what would later be called the Versailles Room), Blanche Wolf wed Alfred Knopf. Though the event was paid for by Blanche’s family, its every detail was orchestrated by Sam Knopf. If Blanche felt the typical bridal jitters and even shared an occasional giggle with her single attendant, Alfred looked the part of the proper groom, stiff and almost military in his bearing. From later behavior it would seem that both the bride and the groom lacked a deep affection for each other from the start. What should have been said at the brief ceremony, as H. L. Mencken suggested often in the coming years, was how anyone could see that until one of them died, books would be at the center of the Kno
pfs’ marriage.

  At Sam’s insistence, Blanche wore Sophie Knopf’s wedding gown from the year before. Shiny white satin trimmed on its bodice with embroidered point lace, “like frostwork on the windows,” the dress had a tulle veil tucked and gathered by sprays of orange blossoms, their scent blending with Blanche’s lilies of the valley. The bride worried that the lush fragrance filling the room was too rich, making it hard for those around her to breathe. Though neither was religious, the couple had been implored by Sam to be married by a man of God. Blanche and Alfred would both remember fondly the officiating justice of the peace, a former rabbi whose skepticism had encouraged him to enter a secular profession.21

  The newlyweds’ honeymoon was organized and paid for by Sam, just as he had done for his daughter. Refusing to allow Blanche the privacy she sought, he sent the wedding announcement to The New York Times, citing White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the same place that Sophie had gone, as the honeymoon location. Alfred would remember his nuptials hazily, at times getting the date wrong by a week or more. He recalled that he and Blanche were only interested in books and music.