The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  Steadfast, both Blanche and Van Vechten supported Hughes’s career throughout his life. (When nine black youths were accused of raping two white women in the infamous Scottsboro case of 1931–37, for instance, Hughes recalled that it was Van Vechten who “encouraged me in my efforts to help publicize [it].” Blanche knew that, more than anyone’s, Carl Van Vechten’s interest in African-American culture was genuine. In the latter half of the 1920s, she worked with him to bring recognition to black writers. She quickly realized that Langston Hughes spoke to her through his references to a “black man’s soul” and as a “Negro” who “ain’t got nobody in all this world, / Ain’t got nobody but ma self.” Such estrangement from “his people,” his belief that he was alone, resonated with the still-young woman, well acquainted with loneliness through her own loveless marriage.6

  Always be true to yourself, Blanche urged Hughes, when he was ambivalent about a novel he wanted to write. In Hughes, Blanche recognized a kindred spirit who depended on books to lead his way, just as she had most of her life. “Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled.” Books had been Hughes’s salvation when his family dispersed by the time he was six: “I believed in books more than people,” he wrote.7

  * * *

  For some years Alfred, egged on by Sam, had talked about the London office he felt Knopf should pursue. Now, looking to 1926, the Knopfs geared up to create their physical presence in London. Blanche, who initially thought that Paris would be a more strategic move, became more enthusiastic after she hired the perfect couple to run the new office: the English author/agent Storm Jameson (who had ensured that D. H. Lawrence went to Knopf, and with whom Blanche had bonded upon first meeting several years earlier) and Storm’s soon-to-be husband, the historian Guy Chapman. In January 1926, Knopf London officially launched. A year and a half later, at Sam’s insistance on a grander edifice, the company rented a five-story building nearby, at 37 Bedford Street, in the heart of the Bloomsbury district.

  Unfortunately, the London office proved to be, as one Knopf employee would later call it, a “folie de grandeur.”8 Storm and Guy resigned within a few years, and though the Knopfs hired someone else to keep the office going, they would shutter it completely in 1931. Sam had been enthusiastic about the office from the beginning, “certain that his son’s company would flourish.” Once again, he invested in the location’s appearance, pouring money into the Bedford Street building while castigating Guy Chapman for his failure to send regular financial statements.9 But Knopf U.K. was a money pit: by 1928, the publishers had already lost $48,000 on an initial investment of $72,000; ultimately, their net loss would be more than $100,000, as Alfred conceded, not counting the “wasted time and effort.”10 (The subsidiary, officially opened January 4, 1926, was not legally dissolved until 1950.) In Alfred’s words, “we had succumbed to the virus of wanting somehow to operate in England.”11 And, he might have added, for allowing Knopf Ltd to be outbid by various British publishers for foreign rights to Knopf’s own American books! It was hard, the Knopfs would discover, to run a business from afar, its bosses too many and too often at odds.

  In February 1926, however, prospects for doing business in London looked strong, and Blanche was pleased to acquire the popular English novelist Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son at Storm’s recommendation. Her faith in Storm was rewarded straightaway: the book appeared on Publishers Weekly’s bestseller list at number three for 1926, and number four for 1927. (Between 1915 and 1934, Zane Grey led the number of bestsellers with nine titles, followed by Deeping and Sinclair Lewis with seven each.)12 Deeping’s novel, based in part on the author’s experiences during World War I, portrayed a man who devotes himself to making his son’s life a success. Reviewing Sorrell and Son, The New York Times said that the novel included “pedestrian pages” as well as “pages of power.” As its sales figures rose, the Literary Review wrote that Sorrell and Son was “an absorbing story. Its characters are Dickensian. Mr. Deeping has made it as fascinating as excavation work for a skyscraper.”13

  To advertise the British novel, Blanche, usually in charge of their fiction campaigns, encouraged Sam, whose best instincts in advertising had usually paid off, to take the lead. Having worked his way into yet another job as executive, this time with the advertising agency Barron Collier, Sam convinced that company to donate to Knopf unsold space on the car-card concession Collier owned on the Long Island Railroad and the New York City subways. (“Car cards” are advertising cards mounted inside the passenger cars of trains, subways, and streetcars, at the ends of the car or above the windows, running lengthwise on both sides.) Sam also managed to rent space on an upper Broadway billboard to market the novel. Sorrell and Son was Knopf’s first book to sell more than a hundred thousand copies, and though Blanche thought the publicity lowbrow, she held her tongue, instead congratulating Sam for his ideas—success was a goal they all endorsed.14

  Eager to acknowledge Knopf’s strong year so far, Blanche threw an early-spring celebration at home. The racially mixed party—in large part due to Van Vechten’s “trend-setting articles” in Vanity Fair—included such figures as James Weldon Johnson; the novelist Walter White; Serge Koussevitzky; the twenty-five-year-old Aaron Copland; the “it” girl of the day, Aileen Pringle, a quick-witted, glamorous movie star with whom Mencken was having an affair; and Kahlil Gibran. Blanche went all out, even hiring someone to sing songs written by Eskimos.15 To the publisher’s delight, Fannie Hurst showed up: the year before, after being introduced by Van Vechten, Blanche and Hurst had become fast friends.16

  In June, Blanche and Alfred returned to London to check on the new office. Blanche was pleased that Storm was about to acquire André Gide’s “novel within a novel” Les Faux-Monnayeurs, or The Counterfeiters.17 The book’s myriad points of view evoked the Cubist art of the era, with numerous homosexual relationships central to the story. Clearly, Storm was in touch with the times, and the Knopfs left for the Continent relieved that their London gamble was proving worthwhile. But Blanche failed to realize how difficult it would be for the three strong Knopf personalities to operate from afar as a team, the future confusion already suggested by the two letterheads they often used interchangeably, the English version lacking the Knopfs’ names and positions, substituting instead Guy Chapman and Storm Jameson as managers of the company.18

  * * *

  The couple undertook individual whirlwind trips to Paris, Berlin, Leipzig, Munich, Dresden, Vienna, Salzburg, Prague, Budapest, and Biarritz, barely making it to Alfred’s brother’s wedding on June 24. Just twelve months earlier Edwin had gotten divorced from Mary Ellis, to whom he’d been married for two years; now he wed Mildred Oppenheimer at Les Charmettes, an extravagant villa Mildred’s aunt had rented for the summer. A promising playwright herself, Mildred would quickly cede her profession to her husband.

  Blanche was eager to return home so that she could concentrate on the “foreign” talent sweeping Harlem. Van Vechten, the “undisputed downtown authority on uptown night life,” along with Langston Hughes, had convinced Blanche that the best current writing was being done by those in the New Negro Movement (later known as the Harlem Renaissance).19 Though ultimately involved in every decision Blanche made concerning “her” Harlem writers, Van Vechten asked that his advisory role be kept confidential. He had too many friends—among them James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson, and even Langston Hughes—who might compete for his attention.

  By the fall, Blanche had signed books by Johnson and Nella Larsen, whose short stories addressed the contradictions of class, race, and gender. When the publisher learned that African-Americans still found it hard to buy orchestra seats in theaters and meals in restaurants, she was shocked. She had believed (from the mixed company at her friends’ parties and her own) that such rank separation had more or less vanished, at least in Manhattan.

  She learned instead that the ugly phrase “nigger heaven,” an allusion to the balcony where
black audience members sat while whites were seated below, said it all. She decided to thwart Sam Knopf and to support Carl’s determination to use the phrase for the title of his new novel, thereby bringing the reality into the open.20 She knew Sam was scared of offending Knopf’s readers or getting pulled into court, but her father-in-law was not supposed to interfere editorially. As for “Henn,” as Blanche sometimes now called Mencken, even his fears about the book’s “orgy passages” failed to dissuade her.21 The final decision was Blanche’s.

  Certainly everyone was abuzz over Nigger Heaven, which was released that August and was selling well by October. It was variously reviewed, though Edwin Clark’s reaction in The New York Times was typical: praising the book and reminding the reader how Van Vechten seldom failed to entertain, he nonetheless suggested that the novelist was not one to go deep.22 Countee Cullen and W.E.B. DuBois were furious at what they considered the perpetration of vicious stereotypes.21 Important black leaders and artists were split in their response: some, including Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Wallace Thurman, thought the novel told an essential truth, though Hughes wrote Carl that “the word nigger to colored people of high and low degree is like a red rag to a bull”—regardless of the author’s intent. As the scholar Emily Bernard says, “For black Americans, language … is a territory.” Language is also one’s homeland, as the writer Czesław Miłosz, displaced for over forty years, maintains.24

  In just four months, the book went into ten printings and sold a hundred thousand copies. Nigger Heaven rejected concepts such as the “natural primitive,” even as it exploited a decadent and exotic Harlem, celebrated by hip white folks. The front of its dust jacket claimed that “Carl Van Vechten continues to act as historian of contemporary New York life, drawing a curious picture of a fascinating group hitherto neglected by writers of fiction”—the overly refined description probably Alfred’s.25

  The novel focuses on a quiet coffee-colored librarian and the young man who loves her, a hopeful writer, determined to sustain their relationship despite society’s racism. They feel lucky to be able to pass as white if they so choose—which they don’t. Van Vechten was bold in calling blacks on internecine racism—the ranking of family and friends on their skin tone even as they seemed to value white professionals more than those of color. At a dinner party, a guest claims scornfully that Harlem residents prefer to “go to white lawyers … white banks and white insurance companies.” Nigger Heaven’s heroine, Mary, wearing Narcisse Noir (Carl’s inspiration from Blanche) dabbed behind her ears, protests that she gets along fine with all colors and believes everyone in Harlem is treated the same whatever the shade of their skin. The hostess disagrees, and someone seconds her, saying, “A white prostitute can go places where a coloured preacher would be refused admittance … Why, even in the Negro theatre they won’t engage dark girls.”26

  Clearly, Nigger Heaven was meant as a polemic. In Harlem the book was loudly denounced by crowds gathered in libraries, and Van Vechten was hung in effigy at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. The instant bestseller, despite or because of its press, became a pocket guide to Harlem. Published when Harlem was in vogue for people in the know, its popularity caused Blanche, on her trips to speakeasies, to become annoyed at the tourists she considered déclassé. Carl, who alone could rib Blanche for her hauteur, started addressing her in letters as “Grand Duchess, Sweet Puss” or, using Mencken’s invention, “Dearest Grand Duchess Cunegunde Wilhelmina Schwartz.”27

  That Thanksgiving, while Alfred was in Chicago, Blanche threw a splendid autumn party with many of her usual crowd. The Robesons were there, along with the Knopfs’ French literary agents, William and Jenny Bradley, and the writer Rebecca West. West and Blanche understood each other instinctively: they both believed in the importance of one’s appearance. Back home, West’s interactions with the defiantly plain Bloomsbury group made her uncomfortable with their smug rejection of middle-class convention. Like Blanche, Rebecca believed that dressing well showed respect for others, while flaunting plainness was a form of arrogance.

  A few days after the social gathering, West wrote Blanche a detailed response to a book by Elinor Wylie and to an article by Mencken, both given her by her new friend. West explained that at times she still found Mencken self-indulgent, going on too long as if “a lazy dawg.” Regarding Wylie’s first book with Knopf (the December 1926 Book-of-the-Month selection), West loved The Orphan Angel, a novel that reimagined the death of Wylie’s phantom lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley. In Wylie’s version, the Romantic poet, instead of drowning, immigrated to America. Though West ordinarily admired Wylie more for her fine writing than for the almost eerie atmosphere she sometimes created, she found the harsh beauty of at least one of the characters in The Orphan Angel as persuasive as a cruel Mayan sculpture.

  At yet another late-night party that Blanche gave, West, who eventually wrote that she found the drunken scene dominating Manhattan in those days wearisome, accompanied Carl to Harlem, where the intrepid pair convinced the blues singer Clara Smith to return with them to Blanche’s party and sing “Dinah” and “St. Louis Blues.” Later they persuaded the tenor Taylor Gordon to perform a round of spirituals. His absence by now no longer conspicuous, Alfred preferred to travel and avoid the frivolous parties of the day, or simply to risk being labeled a misanthrope when he was home. At times almost a recluse, he understood that socializing with the likes of Van Vechten furthered Knopf connections, but he usually left Blanche to serve as hostess while he went to bed.

  For the most part, Alfred dismissed partygoers like Zelda Fitzgerald, who was too agitated to interest him, and whom Blanche also found irritating. Mencken protested, insisting that the Fitzgeralds, introduced to him by Van Vechten, were, when sober, highly intelligent—even though Scott was signed to Charles Scribner’s Sons. Dutifully, Blanche invited them to several preconcert parties, but she continued to find the couple lacking: Scott was often morose, she felt, the writer having decided their generation had “grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” Privately, she worried that he might be right.28

  8

  MENCKEN

  IN JANUARY 1927, Blanche was in Hollywood. Like other writers and publishers, she was eager to get in with the movie crowd, which was buying up novels for the big screen, it seemed, even before they were reviewed. Back east, Mencken waited impatiently for Blanche to return. Menck had convinced Alfred, who needed a tonsillectomy and minor “internal nose repair,” to forgo New York hospitals and seek treatment at cozy Saint Agnes Hospital, near Mencken’s Baltimore home (and, though a charity facility, a bastion of Johns Hopkins fellows). Now he found himself called to the phone repeatedly to answer questions from Sam, who was minding the New York office while the other Knopfs were away.1 Blanche arrived home by the end of the month, in time to relieve her father-in-law of his duties and still get to Boston for the world premiere of Copland’s Piano Concerto, conducted by her beloved Koussie.2

  Back in East Coast working mode by mid-February, she was eager to see the company’s poetry list released in early spring. With the first book’s title, Fine Clothes to the Jew, its author, Langston Hughes, seemed to be (good-naturedly) paying Knopf back for approving Carl Van Vechten’s incendiary Nigger Heaven the year before. But the same critics who had flinched at Van Vechten’s title now also disdained Hughes’s. They were offended by the phrase that referred to those who, pressed for cash, sold their best clothes to Jewish pawn shops.3 Critics generally disliked Hughes’s new work, finding it insulting to virtually everyone: the headline for the Pittsburgh Courier review was “Langston Hughes’ Book of Poems Trash,” while the New York Amsterdam News went with “Langston Hughes—the Sewer Dweller.”4

  Eventually even Hughes regretted the title, deciding that “it was confusing and many Jewish people did not like it.” Not surprisingly, Sam Knopf had vehemently objected to it. Van Vechten, still indignant at Sam’s earlier argument against his own Nigger Heaven, called Sam’s
interference “a pretty piece of impertinence”—and Blanche deferred to her friend; thus Fine Clothes to the Jew stuck.5 Though not particularly successful in sales or critical reception, this collection, along with The Weary Blues, would make Hughes’s reputation. Arnold Rampersad has equated Fine Clothes to the Jew with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in its significance “within the Western canon.”6

  That spring Blanche hoped to listen to the radio with Alfred as Charles Lindbergh, on May 21, landed at Le Bourget Airport outside Paris, following his two-day flight from New York City. Blanche thought that being together while history was made would be a rare occasion that the couple might celebrate. But Alfred had planned his Berlin business trip for mid-May and was out of town for Lindbergh’s triumph. Blanche instead heard the news and watched the subsequent ticker tape parade on Fifth Avenue with Van Vechten. She would arrive in France a few weeks later, where she had managed to schedule a few days with Alfred at Cap d’Antibes, not too far from Jenny Bradley’s vacation home. The Knopfs had been civil to each other of late, though Blanche was aware that their lack of time together underwrote such courtesy.

  In New York, there were separate living arrangements for the couple, allowing Blanche her freedom. The Purchase house was in no way to her taste, its dark wooden interior reminding her just how much she disliked its design. She saw that it could be a great spot for overnight guests, however, especially city writers thrilled at the prospect of a weekend in the country. Now she thought about furnishing both domiciles. To her surprise, Cap d’Antibes turned out to be a perfect place to initiate the process: “Arthur Versay,” much respected by wealthy Americans for his expertise in fine paintings and porcelain, happened to be in nearby Cannes, advising a select group from New York about furnishing their homes with antiques. Blanche believed his taste impeccable and hired him at once. Roaming the shops in the coastal villages, she found a few white French provincial chairs to mix with her prized modern ones, and some sturdy side tables for the heavy look Alfred preferred for the Purchase house, an odd blend of stolid Jacobean and Early American furniture. “Versay” would sit quietly in a corner and, with a subtle movement of his chin, signal his approval or rejection of the piece Blanche was examining.7