The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  * * *

  Within a mere five years of Knopf’s incorporation, Alfred and Blanche had published a list of early work by authors who would later become well-known (though the majority with other, better-paying houses): T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Wyndham Lewis, H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, Ezra Pound, and Carl Van Vechten. Mencken and Van Vechten continued scouting other writers, who in turn recommended their acquaintances. After Floyd Dell spoke of his friend Susan Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles, his enthusiasm caused Blanche to regret having passed when she’d had an opportunity to see it a few years earlier. The story of a woman so battered by her husband that she eventually kills him became an instant stage hit after it premiered in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

  These days, when Willa Cather invited the Knopfs to her large, old-fashioned, but comfortable apartment on Bank Street for her Friday “at homes,” the couple might also stop by to visit Dell, who since January 1918 had been deep into a torrid affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay.13 After “Vincent” and Floyd parted, Millay briefly turned to Knopf’s author the famously homosexual poet Witter Bynner. For now, however, Blanche was not greatly interested in Dell’s love affairs or anyone else’s: she was preoccupied with launching Dell’s autobiographical novel Moon-Calf, set in the Midwest, as was Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. The books appeared within days of each other that September, and of the many important postwar novels published in 1920 by midwestern authors (including Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise), Lewis’s and Dell’s novels presented the most complicated attitudes about small-town living.14

  Though Dell’s protagonist Felix Fay’s journey to adulthood would be seen in years to come as predictable and prosaic and Dell himself as a minor figure, during the early decades of the twentieth century his name appeared in newspapers and book reviews almost daily. By the time he finally hit it big with Moon-Calf—a bildungsroman (as was Fitzgerald’s novel)—he had already been popular for ten years, among the first exodus of midwestern writers to Greenwich Village. As of October 20, 1920, the novel had sold 38,500 copies and gone through eleven printings. In December, Publishers Weekly claimed that Dell’s novel was written “for readers who think.”15

  An innovative advertising campaign had jump-started the book, with Knopf reintroducing the “sandwich man,” used before the turn of the century and now deployed to sell books as well as other products. In September, a temporary phalanx of Knopf sandwich men had swarmed over the financial and theater districts, their sandwich boards advertising Moon-Calf (and other forthcoming titles). According to a contemporary report in Publishers Weekly, the men were “dressed in bright colored artist garb with smock, Windsor tie, and tam-o-shanter. A copy of [all books being] advertised was attached to the sign, for passersby to glance through. At the bottom of each sign the names of the nearest stores were listed. Arrangements were made with retailers in the canvassed neighborhoods to install window displays of the books advertised.” The placards were rotated from place to place so that each bookstore got its “full benefit … Retailers reported substantial sales.”16

  In 1920, the Knopfs prepared to celebrate their fifth publishing anniversary. But despite Alfred’s early promises that they would be equal partners, when he arranged for an homage to be printed honoring “the Borzoi’s five years of publishing,” Blanche was instead omitted entirely. After her death, Alfred told an interviewer that from the start he’d always intended to use his name alone for the company’s moniker, whatever Blanche had assumed.17

  In his foreword to the 1920 homage, its 140 shiny trimmed pages bound in a vivid red-and-gold brocade cover, Alfred wrote that he was approaching “the conclusion of my first five years’ publishing,” and that “my authors” are loyal, as were his “loyal staff.”18 The volume consisted, essentially, of accolades from Knopf authors praising only Alfred as the leader of the Knopf enterprises. Alfred even commissioned a dedicatory piece from Carl Van Vechten. In an age of statistics, numbers were abundant in this “detailed record,” meant to show, one contributor explained, “just what five years of publishing means.” Such authors as Dorothy Richardson, Dell, Mencken, and Hergesheimer expressed their indebtedness to Alfred Knopf for their “recognized place in letters.”19 In his postscript, Alfred—who begins and ends the volume—made the only allusion to Blanche as he passingly noted a promising book currently under consideration. Letters of a Javanese Princess, written by “probably the first feminist of the Orient,” was a manuscript, he implied, “found by Mrs. Knopf.”20

  After his wife’s death, Alfred would begrudge any suggestion that she had been key to their business from the start and would instead assign her to a secondary role. To Susan Sheehan eight years after Blanche died, he said, “I wouldn’t quarrel if she wanted to be on record as saying she helped found the business in 1915.” Sheehan doggedly continued: “She said that she was ‘in publishing’ since your official opening on October 15, 1915.” At this Alfred became impatient: “Well, that’s stretching it a little. But she was insofar as she knew every single thing I was doing.”21 The disregard for her equal part in creating Knopf, reflected in the anniversary brochure, infuriated Blanche and wounded her deeply. She found herself dreading rather than welcoming the trip abroad that the couple was already planning for the following summer, to sign authors around the world while promoting Knopf’s current books as well. Suddenly, she felt herself not only Sam’s but the company’s servant. As if restaking her maternal role, she spent a good deal of time ensuring that everything was set for Pat’s care at the hands of relatives and hired help.

  In May 1921, when Blanche and Alfred sailed upon their first joint business trip to the Continent, few American publishers had preceded them, except to stop occasionally for meetings in London and even less frequently in Paris, before or after vacationing elsewhere in Europe. Blanche was plagued with a variety of physical ailments during the crossing, not least debilitating abdominal cramps from endometriosis. She was ambivalent, too, about following an agenda set exclusively by Alfred. They would stay with the Galsworthys, outside London, and would meet Joseph Conrad, known to Alfred through letters if not yet in person. Meanwhile, she worried about leaving her toddler at home with their nanny.

  She had enrolled him in nursery school for the fall, the brand-new Birch Wathen School (to become in 1991 the Birch Wathen Lenox School) at West Ninety-Third Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, not far from the Knopfs’ Ninety-Fifth Street home.22 Ten years after Blanche died, Pat told an interviewer that around this time, when he was three, Blanche went abroad with Alfred to do business for the first time, and she made sure he would hardly notice, with loved ones always at hand. But it wasn’t only ambivalence about leaving her son that preoccupied her; Blanche was wondering for the first time about her importance to Knopf.23

  For their trip, Alfred chose the Cunard Line’s ocean liner the RMS Carmania. Only recently returned to passenger service, the Carmania had served as a troop ship during the war. Two years later, when the Knopfs sailed, it was not the most luxurious ship, having been refitted and its passenger size cut in half, with trips across the Atlantic taking between five and seven days. But Sinclair Lewis, his wife, Grace, an editor at Vogue magazine, and their young son were on board, and “Red’s” nightly presence at their table guaranteed an exciting, at times even harrowing, voyage. After Lewis sided with the ship’s crew over a pay dispute, the captain was indignant when the writer appeared at dinner in a white dress shirt smeared with coal dust. He also created a drunken spectacle, gloating that he had gone down to the engine room to help the stokers and had urged the men on in their rebellion.24

  After disembarking in Liverpool, the Knopfs saw more of the Lewises in London. The couples were scheduled to meet in Bath, about one hundred miles from the city, for the Derby Day dinner at the Bath Club, one of the region’s major social events. Unfortunately, the event was less than exuberant, since the regional football team had performed worse than ever.25 Blanche wrote friends, with a hin
t of amusement, that Lewis arrived very late to the dinner, and “Old Sydney Pawling” (partner to the English publisher William Heinemann, the Knopfs’ friend) refused to wait to begin the meal. When the ever-voluble Lewis finally presented himself, Pawling punished the garrulous man by not letting him say a word throughout the dinner.26

  After another round of nonstop appointments in London with publishers and agents, the Knopfs were staying at the country house of the publisher Sir Newman Flower, with whom they were acquainted, and his notoriously haughty wife, Lady Evelyn. There, for reasons that remain undisclosed, Blanche attempted suicide. The incident is shrouded in secrecy to this day, and it is only because of the Flowers’ son Desmond’s memoir that we know of the incident at all.

  As Desmond recalled, upon Blanche’s “endeavor,” Lady Evelyn Flower had “stamped up and down the corridor, fuming, ‘I don’t care a damn whether she commits suicide or not, but I won’t have her doing it in my house.’”27 Apparently, Blanche took an overdose of pills. A doctor was called and Blanche’s stomach was pumped, which is the only record that remains of what was surely a terrifying experience, especially as it must have evoked for Alfred the memory of his mother’s death. It seems possible, at least, that the episode expressed Blanche’s despair at having been omitted from the Knopf five-year celebration, an omission that reverberated with industry people she met on this trip. It isn’t hard to imagine Alfred accepting Newman Flower’s assumption that “Knopf” meant Alfred alone, and Blanche feeling powerless to correct their British host. From his engagement promise, she had trusted Alfred to ensure that she played an equal part in building and running Knopf, and she had believed he would add “Blanche Knopf” to the firm’s name eventually. Instead, he had betrayed her, and, now suspecting he didn’t plan to ever include her name, she became despondent.

  * * *

  A week or so later she set off with Alfred to meet Mencken’s friend Thomas Mann in Germany. There, just as Mencken had predicted, Blanche decided Knopf must publish Buddenbrooks. Through an interpreter, she appreciated Mann’s clear writing at once, though she underestimated the translation difficulties of his sometimes trying Germanic syntax. Regardless, in 1995 his biographer Ronald Hayman would say that “never again will it be possible to produce such a corpus of great novels and reach such a wide audience. Unlike other masters of modernism … [Mann] was never obscure, never demanded too much of the reader for his books to be bestsellers.”28

  A novel about the decline of a wealthy North German merchant family, Buddenbrooks would be the first of Mann’s novels printed in English and published in the United States. Blanche hired the respected scholar Helen T. Lowe-Porter to do the translation. (Lowe-Porter would translate Mann’s complete works, except for the later fiction The Black Swan and the unfinished Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.)29 When the two-volume English version of Buddenbrooks sold unexpectedly well in 1924, the Knopfs sent Mann an end-of-year bonus, though nothing in his contract demanded it. Throughout the decade, Blanche would be dealing with Mann and arranging for translations—and in the late thirties she helped him and Katia, his wife, relocate to America, along with several of their children. Though close to the Manns from the start, observing the elderly author’s old-world formality, Blanche always signed herself “Mrs. Alfred A. Knopf.”

  Back home, her depression firmly at bay, Blanche resumed her work with all phases of the company: she solicited authors (including the poets John Crowe Ransom and Edith Sitwell), wrote follow-ups to those she’d met in Europe but had been unable to sign, located translators, read manuscripts, approved book designs, and developed advertising copy. She reprinted world classics, especially novels, having them set in Suburban French type, which imitated script, on paper specially manufactured with an Indian (red-brown) tint. The trip to Europe, although Alfred had chafed to return to the States, had made her appreciate how large the world was that she’d always wanted to explore.

  Before she’d gone abroad, Blanche had even taken a peek at the changes outside her own door, where peace and prosperity encouraged many Americans to believe that “injustice, oppression and exploitation … had been swept away.”30 In May 1921, the musical revue Shuffle Along, beginning its run at Daly’s 63rd St. Theatre, proved a perfect fit for a brave new age. (The show’s hit, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” would be used in Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign.) Blanche was thrilled at the play’s message: the Negro was here to stay—allowed to sit in the orchestra seats, not just the balcony. The musical would run for more than five hundred performances, and within a year several of its singers were appearing regularly at Blanche’s parties, most often Paul Robeson. Part of the show’s barbershop quartet, he was unfailingly accompanied by his wife, Essie, who feared (correctly, it turned out) that he would have affairs with white women if Essie wasn’t always at his side. Shuffle Along, however, the first financially successful Broadway show to use African-American writers and cast, broke the taboo not on miscegenation, but on the even greater illogic forbidding depictions of romantic love onstage between African-Americans.

  Visiting Europe, Blanche had realized that the new American writers—the group of expatriates such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald—were the talk of the Paris cafes. Anything featuring African-Americans was the most popular stage ticket to snag, and Blanche recognized that she herself inhabited the “hottest” city in the world. Manhattan was undergoing dramatic urban transformation (from sixty thousand African-Americans ten years earlier to what would, in Harlem alone, become a community of more than two hundred thousand people in 1930).31 When she arrived home from her first trip abroad, Blanche saw that Harlem had become the “intellectual and artistic capital of the Negro world”—and from there, of New York City.32

  Carl Van Vechten would guide Blanche through this new scene—which he had documented much earlier, in December 1913, when he wrote for the New York Press about the current all-black Harlem production of My Friend from Kentucky. More recently, in 1922, he had published a short essay about Bert Williams, one of the most famous (to mixed audiences) black entertainers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was published in The Reviewer, the literary quarterly recently established in Richmond. Carl had been fascinated by African-American culture since his youth in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where, in spite of its paucity of African-Americans, his father, an insurance salesman, had helped Laurence Jones, a black educator in Iowa, found (with Van Vechten’s funding) the Piney Woods School for Negro Children in Mississippi. Carl grew up assuming that African-Americans were not only like him but more deserving because of their disadvantages. Thus the family was instructed to address their yardman as “Mr. Oliphant” and their cook as “Mrs. Sercey.”33

  Van Vechten would become Blanche’s personal guide into a world new to her but well trodden by her friend. As James Weldon Johnson would claim, “In the early days of the Negro literary and artistic movement, no one in the country did more to forward it” than Van Vechten.34 Carl could easily move between advocating fair treatment of African-Americans to championing their culture, exhorting the twenties “speakeasy intelligentsia” of New York City to pay attention to them.

  And his omnivorous nature made him a perfect scout for Knopf. Van Vechten was eager to make his acquaintance with the southern white literary scene in Richmond that Blanche had described and promised to present to her friend. The small Virginia circle was the equivalent of the artist groups of the Midwest and later the West as well, contingents of writers, painters, and sculptors of the early twentieth century. But that November, Carl and Blanche were both otherwise engaged, so when Blanche sought to sign the Knopfs’ southern friend James Branch Cabell, she sent in their stead her other regulars, Hergesheimer and Mencken. The men would meet at Cabell’s imposing residence in Richmond under Blanche’s behind-the-scenes direction. They went to dinner at the home of the editor Emily Clark before they discussed business the next day. The thirty-five issues of Clark’s Th
e Reviewer, the Richmond-based experimental literary magazine that would last for four years, counted Van Vechten among its first contributors by virtue of the Bert Williams essay he’d written.

  Blanche worried aloud about the men coming off as pushy Yankees, her concern causing Mencken to guffaw. Admittedly, Clark made things a bit awkward when she brought up Mencken’s recent article declaring the South a desert of literary production. Her magazine meant to dissect both the Old and the New South, with controversial social issues addressed and submissions encouraged from new and established writers, including Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and others. Blanche had urged Mencken to rethink his homegrown prejudice. She herself found the South’s newly complicated culture easier to relate to than she had the old, even three years earlier.

  But no matter how well Mencken behaved, or the good feelings he and Hergesheimer generated, the visitors couldn’t secure the deal Blanche sought. Though he was too much the gentleman to discuss money, Cabell made it clear that he was offered much better terms elsewhere. It was a theme to be played out throughout Knopf’s existence as an independent publisher, Blanche disagreeing with Alfred’s penurious assessments that prevented paying higher advances. She chafed from afar while the negotiating with Cabell ensued: How could she acquire the best if she couldn’t compete? She sent a telegram to her husband’s Chicago hotel that assured him he was missed even as it conveyed her real interest, the deal she sought with Cabell: “Dearest there is no news but that I am beastly lonesome for you.”35

  Smoking two packs of Chesterfields a day, she was deflected from focusing on Cabell while she waited eagerly for reaction to Van Vechten’s whimsical yet philosophical novel Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works. A paean to prewar Paris, Peter had been midwifed by Blanche, who’d prodded Carl to finish it. Though the Knopfs had published several books by Van Vechten, he’d not yet had a real success, and Blanche felt sure this would be his breakthrough. She was right: Peter won high praise, its initially slow sales picking up momentum. The Knopf catalog quoted the literary critic Carl Van Doren’s advance review in The Nation: “A biography of an imaginary person,” he claimed, “makes possible at once the freedom of the novel and the sober structure of the biography. Peter Whiffle crosses two literary forms fascinatingly.”36 A blend of the new and the conventional, Peter Whiffle mixed fantasy and realism while positioning the author himself as if present. Not only was Van Vechten the first-person narrator, but many other characters were also presented as real. Perhaps it struck Blanche that she and Peter Whiffle, with their mutual experience of inventing themselves, at some level shared the theme of being someone other than they seemed. After all, Blanche would always pretend that her father was a goldsmith from the Old World.