The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  Even though Blanche usually kept her editorial distance from the dense monthly—she already had too much on her desk to assume an entirely new project—its thoughtful editing caused her to value Mencken even more, as she observed her friend’s engagement with what he considered matters of principle. These days, Blanche found herself seeking Mencken’s advice on her personal life as well as his professional opinion. The publisher’s other best friend functioned similarly, though he was one for literary chitchat as much as serious counsel. In mid-February, Carl brought Blanche up to date on Horace Liveright’s latest shenanigans and told her how when Carl recently had tea with Gertrude Stein, she had proclaimed Liveright disgusting, “a mass of obvious and cheap sensuality.”10

  As if emboldened by the louche image, Blanche stunned her friend by suddenly throwing “all discretion aside” … and informing Van Vechten that she was “tired of sleeping” with Alfred. “What is the world coming to?” Van Vechten asked his wife, Fania.11 Carl was known to be a purveyor of salacious secrets, but he didn’t usually speak of his personal sexual encounters to others, and he assumed that friends like Blanche behaved more conventionally than he, however current they tried to appear. He’d forgotten that he had described in great detail the machinations of Ralph Barton and Carlotta Monterey only months earlier.

  No couple’s intimate habits can be known by anyone other than themselves. But from comments repeated throughout the years after Blanche’s death (and later, after Alfred’s as well), Blanche’s reluctance to sleep with her husband was fueled not only by their sexual incompatibility, but also by her anger over his violent temper and his acquiescence to Sam. From appearances, at least, Alfred seemed oblivious or perhaps indifferent to her feelings. In late-life interviews, despite his awareness of Blanche’s published articles supporting open sex, along with the gossip of friends, Alfred answered questions about Blanche’s extramarital love life by saying, “I don’t think she was unfaithful except with Heifetz, with whom she had an affair.”12 “In the beginning and for a while,” he said, “Blanche’s distinguished friends were virtually all musicians. And there I’m sure I played a large part. But I never pursued it as far as she did. Koussevitzky, for instance: she’d go back during intermission every concert. We’d know the concert wasn’t going to resume until you’d see her come walking down below the stage taking her seat … They were very devoted friends. She had Heifetz, she had Gershwin.”13 To pair Heifetz, a longtime lover, and Gershwin, with whom Blanche was in no way sexually involved, while omitting “Koussie,” was an extraordinary confirmation of Alfred’s ability to deny reality.

  That reality included downstairs talk, the butlers and housemaids telling tales: Mrs. Knopf misbehaved for sure when the mister was away, while his own visitors never seemed to be there for sex but just for dinner with fine wine. Though there would be suggestions through the years that Alfred infrequently turned to other women for sex, more often his friends and colleagues assumed he was “asexual.” Given the times, when “aberrant” behaviors weren’t seemly to advertise, his chilly reserve toward Blanche might make more sense if he’d been homosexual. Instead, it seems that Alfred simply lacked a physical need to connect emotionally with anyone, so he procured prostitutes instead.14

  Fortunately, there never was a better time than the 1920s to be all over the sexual map. It sometimes appeared that romantic relationships everywhere were turning barmy. As Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, with their well-publicized drinking and depressions, exemplified a marriage gone mad, so did couples even closer to home. In March, barely settled down from the Gershwin affair, the singer Mary Ellis took up with the British actor Basil Sydney, causing Alfred’s brother, Edwin, to threaten suicide. (Ellis, who would marry five times before she proclaimed herself a lesbian, later wrote that she’d married Edwin only out of pity when he lost his hand while they were dating.) The drama continued through mid-April, but matters finally came to a head and the couple divorced amicably.15

  Blanche and Alfred were delighted to be completely disentangled from Mary Ellis and Knopf’s competitor Horace Liveright, Edwin’s brother-in-law (through Liveright’s marriage to Ellis’s sister). Liveright was turning out books at least equal to the Knopfs’, including early Faulkner and Hemingway and Eliot’s The Waste Land. (Alfred, for whatever reason not soliciting Blanche’s opinion, had turned down Eliot’s masterpiece.) Goading Alfred at publishing events, the lanky (married) libertine called him “coz” while he openly disported with the women inevitably surrounding him. Increasing his animosity, Alfred knew that Liveright’s father-in-law of a few years, the owner of International Paper, had supplied all the money Liveright could ever want.

  Thus news of Edwin’s divorce was gratifying to the Knopfs from a professional and personal point of view: when Liveright managed to overspend even his father-in-law’s robust endowment and struggled to meet his payroll, the Knopfs, always disdainful of the publisher, surely shared a private conjugal laugh, especially when their twenty-seven-year-old friend the independently wealthy Bennett Cerf, partnering with Donald Klopfer, bought Liveright’s Modern Library in 1925 for $210,000. (In 1927, with Klopfer, Cerf would found Random House and eventually make the Modern Library its subsidiary.)

  And there was more: when he heard of the Modern Library sale, Alfred, believed by Cerf to represent “publishing at its best,” invited him and Klopfer to the office for a talk. There he “launched into a tirade about Horace Liveright,” who had dared put Green Mansions into the series. Though the book had no copyright, Alfred considered it Knopf’s property by now. Worst of all, the arrogant Liveright bragged that it was “the biggest-selling book in the whole Modern Library.” Bennett Cerf told “Mr. Knopf” truthfully that he’d known nothing about this, to which Alfred replied, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Cerf suggested his Modern Library pay Knopf six cents per copy sold, which Alfred thought “very fair, since legally he [Alfred] had no case.”16 Thus began a friendship between Knopf and Cerf that would ultimately change the publishing world.

  * * *

  More modestly, the Knopfs were expanding their enterprise, too. The American Mercury now featured a monthly advertisement for Knopf, The Borzoi Broadside, which would evolve into The Borzoi Quarterly. A pamphlet accompanied by a personal message written by Alfred, the Quarterly promoted Knopf’s new books. The American Mercury’s launch under Mencken had proved good timing, with the journalist’s popularity at an all-time high in the summer of 1925. Harvard students regarded him as a defender of the logical versus the fantastic, of evolution versus creationism, a brilliant sardonic voice, much as today’s audience views Jon Stewart. Mencken’s scathing eyewitness coverage of the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” in which Clarence Darrow went up against William Jennings Bryan, would see him emerge a kind of national hero. Filed with The Baltimore Sun, his reports had even provided pretrial advice to the ACLU, a gutsiness that Blanche admired. Scopes himself, forty years later, suggested that “in a way it was Mencken’s show,” with the journalist’s “lacerating critique” of the Bible Belt (a term Mencken coined) and the “booboisie” (also his) winning lasting attention.17

  That public affection was not, however, lasting: within a year after the trial, five hundred newspaper editorials about Mencken were published, 80 percent of them unfavorable. He had let loose with such “withering scorn” that much of the population felt personally attacked.18 Blanche was determined to support Mencken through this period, though her time with him was newly limited, due to her mother’s serious distress. When she had noticed Bertha acting “unlike herself,” Blanche postponed her spring buying trip to Europe. On May 17, Bertha had a massive stroke. Belatedly, Blanche realized why the fifty-nine-year-old woman had insisted on traveling to Europe earlier that year to see distant friends and relatives, a trip whose ever-changing plans Blanche had found exhausting. Bertha had been battling arteriosclerosis at least since her husband’s death seven years earlier, so the cerebral thrombosis in her right hemisphere
couldn’t have been a complete surprise. For sixteen days she lay unconscious, having suffered a “bleed in her brain,” and on June 3, 1925, with her daughter at her side, she died.19

  As a final gesture of respect, Blanche honored her mother’s wishes (the costs having been covered in her will) to be buried at Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn, alongside Julius (as well as the Guggenheims and other well-known Jewish families).20 Her mother left “no less than” five hundred thousand dollars to Irwin and Blanche, to divide equally, with Belmont Garage left to her son exclusively.21 Though financially taken care of, Blanche was otherwise on her own now, without protection, psychologically, against Alfred and his father.

  On the night of the funeral, Blanche cheerlessly dressed for Sam’s birthday party. Barely pausing to process the loss of her mother, she prepared to depart for Europe with Alfred, Pat, and his governess, their ship disembarking the next morning. Little information exists about the family’s journey. Once they were ashore, the three set off for different destinations, Alfred to London and Pat to join Edwin on an Alpine vacation. Blanche made her typical rounds. Her longest stop was in Paris, a city flush with American as well as foreign writers. In spite of recently giving birth, her French agent Jenny Bradley was continuing her weekly gatherings for authors at her dual home/office on the Île Saint-Louis. The guests might include such current figures as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, André Malraux, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. With the Knopf writer André Gide, Blanche attended Natalie Barney’s salon as well, where the atmosphere was less casual but especially welcoming of women.

  The publisher returned to New York several months later displaying a new confidence, as if losing her mother had driven her to take a new tack. At board meetings, when Alfred resumed talking over her as if she weren’t even at the table, she began interrupting him. Sometimes going too far when nothing seemed to blunt her husband’s rudeness, she deliberately nettled him: she’d turn to the man on her left, then her right, speaking softly until Alfred shouted at her to be quiet. Everyone knew what was coming: Alfred went into high dudgeon with whatever Knopf worker was at hand, surrounded by those who looked into their laps in embarrassment. At times, the volatile Alfred antagonized Blanche at editorial meetings, swooping down on her just as she thought there was an all-clear. Ralph Colin, a member of the board for thirty years (he resigned the year Blanche died) and an important figure in New York City’s music and arts community, remembered how personal the Knopf fights had become by the time he was there, neither allowing anything to pass. “They were lying in wait for the other to make a misstatement.” Yet, Colin added, “we were always sure Alfred was absolutely crazy about Blanche.”22

  Continuing, Colin said that the Knopf marriage wasn’t “broken up by her one serious lover, Hubert Hohe. It would have broken up anyway: the hopelessness of Blanche’s competition with Alfred. No matter what she could do, he could do it better. He was the name.”23 As Pete Lemay said, “The audience Alfred desperately needed nourished a streak of cruelty in him.”24

  Blanche understood that no one, including her son, dared cross Alfred. She became tense when she and Alfred took authors to lunch and he ordered expensive wine for those guests he was trying to woo, and lesser selections for others at the table. More than forty years later, after Knopf published Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Alfred went to dinner at his author’s home. When her husband, Paul Cushing Child, proudly picked a wine from his carefully collected cellar, Alfred said not a word, but he “surreptitiously turned his back to him and took notes on the labels.” He refused to compliment his host, “and as soon as he was in the living room, he whipped out a cigar.” Paul “never got over it.”25 An earlier time, when the Knopfs took the University of California, Berkeley, law professor Farnham Griffiths to lunch, Alfred nudged Griffiths to tell Blanche to put out her Chesterfield: the smoke would ruin everyone’s palate for the wine. A gallant man, Griffiths declined, and Alfred signaled the waiter to remove the guest’s wineglass.26

  As William Koshland said of his boss, “He ruled as a potentate” and was “monumentally insensitive.”27 Often it seemed as if Alfred totally forgot about feelings. But not everyone cared. In an interview with the writer Susan Sheehan, the longtime editor in chief of The New York Times Book Review Francis Brown praised Alfred, with whom he dined at Purchase a few times a year and could “ask for bourbon or scotch and get it.” He hailed his host as a “great publisher,” in part because the two men connected without any effort. Blanche had adopted the opposite strategy of Alfred’s: she listened intently (her MO obvious in photographs) to her writers, and those she respected from other houses, encouraging them to do all the talking. While such intensity invited easy confidences, it could also imply, to the careless observer, that she was by silent decree inferior to her husband, who was never willing just to listen.28 Anyone with powers of observation knew that such an assumption about Blanche was as far from the truth as Alfred’s would-be omnipotence.

  PART TWO

  7

  HARLEM

  IN 1925 KNOPF WAS CELEBRATING ITS TENTH YEAR. The nationally syndicated Brooklyn Daily Eagle, one of the nation’s top-ten newspapers, sent the reporter Cecelia Garrard to interview Blanche in her office for their Sunday magazine section. Garrard exclaimed over Blanche’s unusual position; women had become more common in business, but never as married partners. The reporter asked Blanche how the Knopfs settled differences over acquisitions, for instance. “Smiling,” Blanche replied that they discussed their feelings with each other and came to an agreement—or yielded to the spouse better versed in the literature at hand. Often, however, “We compromise … and if we couldn’t agree, we wouldn’t take it.”1

  Though Knopf’s current anniversary pamphlet mentioned Blanche more often than the version created five years before, it was still primarily an homage to Alfred. Blanche was determined to insert herself into the story now, creating a mythical confluence between her wedding anniversary and the start of Knopf. “You mean … that you took on a husband and a business at the same time? That you said ‘I do’ to two things at once?” the incredulous reporter asked. “I didn’t marry the business,” Blanche replied. “I helped start it. I feel far more like a mother than a wife to it.”2

  A confused Garrard switched tactics and pursued the “mother” reference, asking Blanche about Pat, but Blanche kept pushing Knopf publishing. As the alarmed interviewer sensed that Blanche might prove stubborn after all, Garrard assured her audience in a parenthetical comment that the publisher was “no Lucy Stoner.” (Lucy Stone, an American suffragist and abolitionist, fought for women to keep their “maiden” names after marriage—her followers were referred to as “Lucy Stoners.”) In near frantic prose, Garrard told her readers that Blanche not only shared her husband’s name, but was also dressed to dazzle—she didn’t even “look bookish. Not a bit—and she had a child as well.” Despite Blanche’s maneuvers to make her equal status with Alfred clear, the article’s title read “Man and His Wife Chief Officers in Publishing Firm.”3

  Sam Knopf seems to have ignored the interview, possibly chagrined that Blanche came off as fearless. During the years the patriarch had been serving as treasurer of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., he had also continued working as merchandising adviser to the American Exchange-Pacific National Bank and as business manager of The American Mercury. To Blanche’s suggestion that perhaps Sam had too much on his plate (her worry proved prescient), her father-in-law growled. As the literary agent Lurton Blassingame would remark after Sam’s death, he was a man “with a tremendous store of crude, nervous energy, an active, practical mind, and strangely enough, an outcropping vein of sentimentalism.”4 Such sentimentalism was meant to compensate for his petty meanness to underlings—or to those around whom he felt insecure, such as Blanche.

  Toward the end of 1925, when Blanche recognized that she needed a distraction from Alfred and his father, she convinced Van Vechten to find her a first-
rate teacher of modern dance to prepare for holiday parties. Soon she and five women friends, including the actress Helen Hayes and the author Anita Loos, who had written the bestselling Gentlemen Prefer Blondes that year for Liveright, were taking weekly lessons. Working hard to master the Charleston and the newer Lindy Hop at the studio of Charles David, who had co-choreographed Shuffle Along, the group soon added the more difficult Black Bottom, which had originated at the Harlem music hall that would later become the Apollo Club. Blanche reveled in the chance to have fun among women she trusted. Emboldened at one dinner party that she gave in her apartment, she mysteriously disappeared, to return in top hat and cane, play a 78 on the Victrola, and perform a medley of all three dances with heady confidence. Alfred applauded vigorously, even as the guests seemed unsure what to think. She knew that Alfred was baffled as well, and that he admired her.

  Increasingly, Harlem felt like Blanche’s world, not least because she was receiving a steady stream of poetry and prose from writers directed her way by Van Vechten. Only a few months before the year ended, while appearing at a cabaret organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Carl had been introduced to the twenty-two-year-old poet Langston Hughes. Later, when an African-American periodical, Opportunity, sponsored a literary contest that Hughes won, both Carl and Vachel Lindsay urged him to send his poems to Blanche.

  Wowed by the bold originality of the work, she immediately arranged to publish The Weary Blues, whose first printing in 1926 would become emblematic of its times. As Hughes’s biographer Arnold Rampersad recounts, sales of his books over the years would vary, “from a few hundred when The Dream Keeper appeared in 1932 to several thousand on the publication of his Selected Poems in 1959. Volumes such as Fields of Wonder [1947] and One-Way Ticket [1949] did poorly, which probably led Knopf to pass on his Montage of a Dream Deferred [Holt, 1951].”5