It must have come as a relief to them both that Pat was headed to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. The Knopfs’ friend Judge John Woolsey had advised them that Exeter was a better choice than Andover. Woolsey, a frequent dinner guest of the Knopfs, was a man both parents trusted—and, almost as important, he had connections at Phillips. That August, excited about the fine preparatory education her son would receive, Blanche took Pat shopping for clothes, at least as much as he would tolerate. When he complained of a severe stomachache, she assumed he was just tired of trying on blazers and wanted to go home. But after he vomited in Brooks Brothers, she rushed him to Mount Sinai Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where doctors removed his appendix. Blanche was terrified that she’d lose her child, not least because the crisis occurred while Pat was under her care. Alfred, who was abroad, would never forgive her.
Decades after his mother’s death, Pat told the story of her sleeping both nights on the hard floor next to his hospital bed, with no implication that she’d rather be in her office.6 Or at home, in bed, he might have added. Dieting hard again, Blanche, under a good deal of stress, was not at her diplomatic best in those days. When she got news that Ivan Bunin had just become Knopf’s sixth Nobel winner, she uncharacteristically muttered, “What in the world did he win it for?”7 A Russian novelist whose criticism was aimed equally at Bolshevism and at Hitler, Bunin left her cold.
She grew especially irritable about the ten pounds that arbitrarily came and went and that on her small frame were magnified. She had tried Van Vechten’s solution for losing weight—“Dearest Grand Duchee,” he had coached her, “Macy’s has Nutra diet grapefruit juice in cases … [If] they get out again call Nutra diet—they have a wholesale place in Brooklyn and they will tell you where to buy.”8
Eventually, she discovered new pills that not only obliterated her appetite but also added a kick to her day. They became her “magic” pills. Used during World War I by the French to manufacture dynamite, DNP caused those employees inadvertently dusted with the chemical to lose weight. Scientists later understood why: the nutrient energy burned off as heat, which was effective for calorie loss but capable of literally cooking people to death internally if they took too large a dose.
Very little of this was appreciated in 1933, however, when word leaked out about the paper to be published the next summer in the well-regarded Journal of Clinical Investigation.9 Even as a newly inaugurated president promised he would end the massive hunger caused by the Depression, W. C. Cutting, D. A. Rytand, and M. L. Tainter—all researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine—reported on using DNP for weight control in their (now classic) paper “Relationship Between Blood Cholesterol and Increased Metabolism from Dinitrophenol and Thyroid.” The story about instant weight loss, as it was soon dubbed by the media, spread virally, and anyone who had a doctor with connections could get the miracle pill. As early as December, Popular Science would run an ad claiming “Safe Drug Takes Off Two Pounds a Week.”10 Within two years, at least a hundred thousand Americans were taking DNP, and, never hungry, they were indeed losing two to three pounds a week. Within another three years, however, it was clear that DNP was dangerous stuff. A sizeable number of people died for no apparent reason, while hundreds more had developed severe cataracts that would leave them blind. In 1939, the FDA would ban DNP for all human use in the United States.
But for now Blanche felt she had found the answer, a pill whose only side effect was to make her a bit edgy. Even that edge had its value, as she celebrated the preholiday extravaganza sweeping the city: at last Prohibition had been officially repealed. Alfred, who claimed to be one of six publishers to attend the alcoholic Horace Liveright’s funeral in 1933, wondered aloud at the abuse the tyrannical law had provoked, while Mencken wrote eloquently of the absurd Volstead Act itself:
Years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more.11
And on December 6, 1933, the day after Prohibition was officially pronounced dead, Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in a landmark case that Ulysses was not obscene. Meanwhile, Joe Lesser’s end-of-year report was disheartening: for 1933, Knopf’s sales totaled $500,500, with a loss of $18,800.12 Blanche would have to fight hard to keep Alfred from moving the company to White Plains, a shift he’d long been hinting at, and a change that would leave Blanche out in the cold.
PART THREE
13
MONEY PROBLEMS
SIX MONTHS AFTER ITS RELEASE IN 1933, the novel Anthony Adverse, by Hervey Allen, had become a huge commercial success. Published by Farrar and Rinehart, who had begun publishing in 1929 (persuading Floyd Dell to leave Knopf for the new company’s higher advances), the novel with its Byzantine intricacy seems a forerunner of The Da Vinci Code. Anthony Adverse ended the year at the top of the bestseller list, where it would remain throughout 1934, selling more than two million hardcover copies. The timing was right for the 1,224-page behemoth: the three-dollar cover price made it a bargain when a good deal on anything was hard to find, paperbacks still a few years in the future. Blanche wrote John Farrar, whom she knew and liked, a brief note of congratulations. Twelve years later, with the arrival of Roger Straus and his focus on international literature, Farrar and Rinehart had morphed into Farrar, Straus, and a third partner, Robert Giroux, was eventually added. They would quickly become, along with Knopf, one of the finest boutique firms around.1
Blanche trusted John Farrar from the first. Relieved at, rather than envious of, Anthony Adverse’s success, she was similarly pleased that Bennett Cerf and Ulysses had finally made it through the censors’ hoops. Publishers were starting to band together, and Blanche shared a real sense of camaraderie with her competitors. Of course, she was relieved when The Thin Man was praised. On January 7, 1934, The New York Times said that “those who enjoy a good story, racily told in the sort of language that a roughneck might be expected to use will find … a welcome relief from the neatly patterned solutions of the miracle men of detective fiction.”2 The New Statesman called The Thin Man “an unusually brilliant read as a detective story—[one that] has every right to consideration on its literary merits.”3 Before long, The Thin Man had become an “overnight sensation,” due in part to Knopf’s deft publicity: an ad in The New York Times featured Alfred protesting that “the question on page 192 of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man” has “nothing to do with its popularity … Twenty thousand people don’t buy a book within three weeks to read a five-word question.” Alfred was cannily referring to Nora Charles’s query to her husband, Nick: When wrestling with Mimi (a major character in the novel), didn’t Charles “have an erection?”4 The open marriage practiced by Nick and Nora and the “risqué” bordering on “immoral” treatment of sex in general caused The Thin Man to be banned in Canada, while the book would save Knopf from bankruptcy during what was, arguably, their worst Depression year. The novel was made into a movie shot in twelve days that summer, starring Myrna Loy and William Powell, who between them downed thirty-three drinks in the course of the film.
The Thin Man features Nick Charles, a former New York City private detective whose wealthy young wife, Nora, supports him, having enabled him to quit work and do little but drink cocktails around the clock. In real life, working with the alcoholic and melodramatic Hammett had worn out Blanche. In The Thin Man, Nora comes up with a plan to get her husband back into the thick of life, and Blanche must have wished that art had imitated life a bit more. In the novel, Nora motivates Nick to rejoin the real world, where he investigates the disappearance of the eccentric patriarch Clyde Wynant. The police suspect Wynant of faking a crime and absconding with others’ money. Instead, Wynant is found dead, a murder victim, his thin corpse s
tuffed inside a “fat suit.”
Just one month after The Thin Man was published, Knopf released James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Before the war, Cain had been managing editor of The New Yorker and then, upon his return, at Mencken’s behest, a writer for The Baltimore Sun—and had squired Mencken’s future wife, Sara Haardt, around town. Now, back home in Annapolis, he’d begun writing occasional pieces for The American Mercury and, until it folded in 1931, The (New York) World. The previous summer, The World’s editor, Walter Lippmann, a longtime friend of Blanche, had urged her to take on a “hard-boiled” mystery written by the ex-soldier Jimmy Cain. Lippmann offered Knopf right of first refusal, if she acted fast—within hours, according to the account the Knopfs later gave. Blanche read the 35,000-word novel immediately and proclaimed it top-notch. In keeping with the couple’s agreement to consult each other before accepting a book, Blanche tried frantically to reach Alfred, who was playing golf at Sands Point, Long Island. When she got hold of him, the Knopfs decided to take it at once. (Cain would instead tell Drew Dudley, a friend of Blanche’s, that Alfred, in a “curmudgeonly letter,” had at first declined Postman.)5
Throughout the next decade, a trail of spectacular Knopf mystery writers would be signed by Blanche, including Raymond Chandler and Eric Ambler. Detective fiction, whose unreliable characters, bad luck, and exotic violence paralleled the country’s struggles, was perfect for the times. That Blanche could move from the rarefied French translations she acquired at Knopf’s founding, to the twentieth-century English-language poetry and fiction she secured, to the bold African-American literature she had quickly appreciated, and now to this gritty Depression-era aesthetic, suggests an extraordinary, intuitive sensitivity and ability to anticipate the popular reading tastes of the times.
After both detective novels proved successful (though Cain’s had disappointing sales, the studios fell in line to buy film rights), Blanche was secure enough about the company’s survival to go abroad as usual. First, however, she came up with a press notice that got all the papers talking: “A number of book-page editors were astonished at a [recent] Knopf release announcing that Mrs. Knopf was going to Europe on the Conte di Savoia to meet Fafner Niederholtz, Tristan Traumweig, Serafino Umilerto, Albertine Disparue, Ga Fraaloma, Gregor Visilovitch Yakounchikov, Hacken Trom Golfstein, Pakves, Agememnon Parpadulion, and Moden Salchuvenec.” This piece of news, which was faithfully reported by the major wire services, was followed the next day by a Knopf press release clarifying that Mrs. Knopf would in fact be seeing Hugh Walpole, Lion Feuchtwanger (a German-Jewish novelist who influenced Bertolt Brecht), Virginia Woolf, and other writers with recognizable names. A journalist recounted that “the joke, it appears, was Mrs. Knopf’s idea.”6
* * *
Among several manuscripts to be delivered to her while she was overseas was a small book of poems by Langston Hughes, which Blanche imagined would bring Hughes—and Knopf—further literary distinction. But when Carl Van Vechten sent her Hughes’s latest work, Blanche genuinely disliked it. The polemical emphasis on the downtrodden worker might have found an audience some years ago, she told him, but its hopelessness was unsuitable now, in the heart of the Depression.
Typical of the collection were poems such as “Let America Be America Again” and “Park Bench,” where the tone is set by such phrases as “America never was America to me” and “I live on a park bench. / You, Park Avenue.” Some of the poems seemed sympathetic to communism, though the collection is ostensibly about the disadvantaged of all creeds and colors, with the majority of the seventeen poems highlighting the mistreatment of black Americans, including “Lynching Song,” with its inflammatory “Pull at the rope!”
After communicating with Van Vechten, who shared her opinion, Blanche cabled Hughes that she agreed strongly with Carl’s rejection of his political poetry: the timing was bad for this kind of protest literature, especially by a relatively new voice. Attempting to soften the blow, she wrote that he had already become “much too important than this [political] poetry” and such a publication would “tend to harm [his] name rather than help it.”7
Hughes wasted no time reacting to his publisher’s rejection, coldly addressing his response to “Mrs. Knopf” instead of the usual “Blanche.” On reflection, he had decided he wanted to put out a cheap edition aimed at “the working class audience,” and if Knopf wouldn’t publish it, would they object if he put it out with International Publishers or a similar press? Blanche quickly agreed, and in April 1938, the twenty-page collection, A New Song, finally saw print when the International Workers Order printed fifteen thousand copies that sold for fifteen cents each. Meanwhile, Blanche and Hughes became close again.8 And there were other riches Blanche approved in 1934: Knopf published Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks, fourteen short stories that are among his best-known works.
Once she’d worked out the Langston Hughes contretemps, Blanche spent time at the Manns’ comfortable old villa at Küsnacht, near Zurich. She invited “Tommy” (as Katia called him) and his wife to join her in New York in a few months, at Knopf’s expense, to celebrate publication of the first volume of Mann’s tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers. “Wir kommen,” the writer said. From the other side of the Atlantic, Leopold Stokowski wrote Blanche, imploring her to come to his early concert in Philadelphia, but she replied that she would still be at the Manns’. By now, Stokowski was among Blanche’s least favorite lovers anyway. According to Larry Huffman, who maintains a Stokowski website, the conductor was “particularly secretive about his activities, and a person he was with one day usually would not know of his activities the day before or the day after.”9 Though Huffman ascribes such secrecy to the conductor’s natural discretion, Blanche would have found it unsatisfying, since his furtiveness made her feel less than special.
Stokowski wrote that he recalled first meeting her “a long time ago”—probably referring to their liaison of 1925. She had praised his hour-long Ninth Symphony, applauding him for not insisting on dragging it out, as so many conductors did; and in return he used his notoriously overripe prose to describe the “lifetime of feeling” he experienced during those sixty minutes as he “penetrated deeply into such a colossal work”—“enter[ing] a vast temple … the very heart and mind of Beethoven.” Remembering their first encounter, Stokowski wrote: “I was running up some steps, and you were standing at the top; and I was so struck by your beauty that I asked someone who you were, and everybody seemed either shocked or amused.” After begging her to meet him again soon, after a concert in Philadelphia (“I should like so much to see you”), he concluded by thanking her for the pleasure she gave writing to him about the Ninth Symphony years ago.10
On her return in February, Blanche appeared at a tea for the exile Emma Goldman, allowed into the United States for a lecture tour; later that day she went to a party given for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas by Random House. But she was once again preoccupied with the future of the house she and Alfred had built together. The 1934 financials showed that, their many successes notwithstanding, their future was precarious. The Depression had finally taken its toll on the publishing industry, including on Knopf.
Publishers needed to tread more carefully than in the recent past. When the notoriously irascible Lillian Hellman accompanied her lover Dashiell Hammett to Blanche’s office one afternoon, after her play The Children’s Hour had opened on Broadway, Blanche congratulated her and offered to publish it with an advance of “$150.00.” Hellman responded, “$500.00.” Blanche looked her squarely in the eye and said, “Why does a girl who’s sitting over there wearing a brand new mink coat need $500?” But she paid it because she wanted the play—and to ensure, as long as she could manage him, that Hammett would stay with Knopf.11
Unlike Blanche, Alfred seemed energized by their financial woes. He decided Knopf should have its own book club, though on a more modest level than the Book-of-the-Month, that still novel but highly successful enterprise. Blanche’s opini
on (she was against the idea) didn’t matter: as before, Alfred’s plan referred only to himself. Even when Alfred cited specific European writers Blanche had signed, he continued to speak in the first-person singular, as if Knopf consisted of him alone.12
Alfred wrote in The Borzoi Quarterly to subscribers:
During the last 20 years, I have introduced to America many writers so far ahead of their times that even competent critics found difficulty in adequately appraising their worth and the importance of my discoveries. You cannot establish a Cather, a Hudson, an Undset or a Mann with the customary publishing ballyhoo … My problem has been to find the comparatively few intelligent minds, ready and eager for great discoveries. In this I have had a measure of success. I have published six Nobel Prize winners.
The dominant “I” must again have infuriated Blanche. Probably due to timing—it was the depth of the Depression after all—the club failed.13
* * *
Meanwhile, Edwin Knopf was thriving in Hollywood. Currently a story editor at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he was climbing the ladder to become a producer. (In 1935, Samuel Goldwyn would put out The Wedding Night, starring Gary Cooper and based on Edwin’s script.) While Alfred went to see his brother that fall, Blanche would travel abroad, even allowing herself a side excursion to Jenny Bradley’s vacation home at Cap d’Antibes, where she could forget her trials with Hammett and Hughes for a few days.
The Lady with the Borzoi Page 16