On October 1, Blanche threw a party for Wallace Stevens at the Harmonie Club, the second-oldest private club in New York City, which had been created by German Jews not allowed membership in such clubs as the Union and the Metropolitan. (The Harmonie Club had been opened to non-Jews at the end of World War II.) Stevens’s Collected Poems was scheduled for release by Knopf the following day, on the poet’s seventy-fifth birthday.42 The New York Times reported that the “biggest group of major poets you ever saw got together at a recent New York lunch to pay tribute to one of their number. The guest of honor (a quiet man) had already won the Bollingen Prize for 1949 and the National Book Award for 1950: wouldn’t this be a fine year for him to receive the Pulitzer?” Which he did, in April, before dying in August of stomach cancer. Blanche had mixed feelings about Stevens; she admired his work and surely felt a sympathy for him. Stevens had married a woman whom his parents considered beneath him. As a result, he severed relations with them until after his wife’s death. Stevens’s racism, however, never failed to shock and dismay Blanche, as when he referred to Gwendolyn Brooks as “a coon” while judging the National Book Awards.43
By the end of 1954, Pat Knopf had become an official part of the family business, and (though Alfred would take the credit) he had enabled the launch of Knopf’s new paperback imprint, Vintage Books, which published high-quality paperbacks of Knopf’s earlier hardback issues. Alfred would later state, “There isn’t very much to say about the Vintage experiment. There we were frank imitators. The true and only begetter of this kind of paperback is Jason Epstein, the young man who developed Anchor Books for Doubleday [the year before]. And the only credit we can take for it is that we were at least smart enough and not too proud to follow and not too long thereafter.” Pat worked out in detail the general scheme for Vintage, with Alfred maintaining that it was a somewhat mysterious publishing operation “in the sense that I have never been able to discover what it is that makes one title right” to print in paperback versus another.44
Meanwhile, Blanche was working hard to convince the board, and especially Alfred, to buy Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park away from Rinehart & Company, who’d published The Naked and the Dead. According to Joe Lesser, “when Alfred did sometimes interfere with Blanche’s choices, [it was] almost always to the firm’s detriment. She had excellent judgment.”45 But Alfred had been snubbed years before by Mailer, or thought he had, and the publisher disliked him as a result. Now declaring that the novel’s excessive sex was reason enough to reject it, Alfred joked that the only part of the book not about sex was its title. Exercising the right of either partner to refuse an acquisition, he declined Blanche’s request to bid on The Deer Park, citing other editorial opinions, which, for fear of offending their (primary) boss, always lined up with Alfred’s when matters were put to a vote.
Arguably, Norman Mailer had led the postwar literary revolution with The Naked and the Dead in 1948. Tom Wolfe would soon experiment with the mixed genre of truth and fiction, just as Willa Cather had by inserting historical figures into Death Comes for the Archbishop. Blanche saw that the mid-fifties evinced a new age, just as the 1920s had. In 1955 she worked tirelessly to get Mailer’s The Deer Park, but Pat and Alfred kept erecting roadblocks. Finally, after being rejected by half a dozen publishers, The Deer Park went to Putnam (which paid the highest advance in its history).46
Pat remembers the decision to pass on The Deer Park as being all his fault. Someone in the business “came up to me before a sales conference and said, ‘I hear you’ve got a Norman Mailer manuscript called Deer Park and if your father doesn’t know about it you have to tell him: It’s an absolutely dreadful book and it cannot be published.’ Well, I didn’t know anything about it, so I sent a note to my father”—a decision that infuriated Blanche, who usually dealt with fiction. At least Alfred wrote Pat back, saying, “If someone has anything to say about this, tell him to say it to your mother.” So Pat “got hell from her for getting involved.”47
Similarly, Joe Lesser would later reveal that it was Alfred who had refused to acquire Sinclair Lewis when he left Harcourt Brace, because the books were being auctioned and “AAK refused to compete whether it’s Lewis or anyone else.” Decades earlier, Knopf had also lost their chance at Thomas Wolfe, whom Blanche had wanted to publish. Wolfe had told her he didn’t like Scribner, a patrician firm, and was ready to leave them. But Alfred thought that was a poor reason to move to Knopf. He wanted writers who considered Knopf superior to other houses, pure and simple. He told Blanche that if she acquired Wolfe he, Alfred, would leave the firm. “Blanche was much more intuitive in her judgments,” Alfred would eventually decide. “I was intuitive part of the time. Can’t trust it all the time, to publish with your fingertips, so to speak.”48
22
NEW TERRITORIES
IN EARLY 1955, Blanche and Alfred were photographed for an Associated Press news release as they “greet[ed] their new poodles at New York International Airport [Idlewild] after the show dogs arrived on a Pan American World Airways clipper from Paris.” Four months old, the dogs had been bred in “the kennels of Princess Amedee de Broglie in Chantilly.”1 A new secretary, Eleanor French, had arranged the publicity. Towering over her employer by a good foot, French would remain with Blanche for the rest of her life. John Hersey recalled that the “two poodles … looked exactly like [the Knopfs]. After a few months, Alfred’s dog, Engel, had long mustaches and swaggered and was very grumpy. And Blanche’s dog, ZZ, was a tiny little starving creature curled up on a pillow on a chair.”2 Louis Kronenberger, drama critic for Time, remembered that the dogs got “Abercrombie and Fitch … cases of grooming equipment for Christmas.”3
Blanche had robust plans for her European trip that summer of 1955. According to Publishers Weekly:
She will be visiting publishers as well as many European writers … In France, she will see, among others, Albert Camus, Pierre Daninos, author of The Notebooks of Major Thompson; and Jules Roy, author of The Navigator. In Switzerland, she will see Thomas Mann, whose Confessions of Felix Krull comes out September 19 and Arthur Meeker, whose Chicago, with Love was a valentine to the [city. She will] visit Jose Maria Gironella, author of The Cypresses Believe in God. In Italy, she will see, among others, Count Valentina Bompiani, the famous Italian publisher who recently was in the United States. She will also visit Rome and Milan, Bonn and Frankfurt, and will spend several weeks in England, including a side trip to Ireland to see Elizabeth Bowen.4
Most of the appointments went well, especially her excursion to Bowen’s estate, where she found she could relax. Katia Mann, however, ended up taking Blanche not to her home for lunch, as she’d suggested in a letter months earlier, but to her husband’s grave, where Blanche laid flowers. Thomas Mann had died of an embolism on August 12—a month before Knopf released the first part of Felix Krull. A novel that expanded on Mann’s earlier story of a charming confidence man, Felix Krull was possibly a reflection on the ease with which Mann had lived a double life himself, his family on one side and his homosexual yearnings on the other.
Blanche was still aggrieved over losing The Deer Park, especially after learning that Knopf’s third-quarter sales were the largest in the firm’s history. Mailer would only have added to the luster. In October 1955, soon after the novel’s release, she gave a large cocktail party, audaciously inviting Mailer. “I think Mrs. Mailer was a Mexican,” Alfred said, apropos of nothing. “Toward the end of the party, I felt that I had been a rude host so at the door I shook hands with the Mailers and talked to him.” Mailer told Alfred he would regret his decision not to take The Deer Park: he bet his book would sell more than one hundred thousand copies. Alfred responded that he didn’t bet. He later received a nasty letter from Mailer, who was helping launch The Village Voice, inviting Alfred to “suck his cock.”5 Pat Knopf remembered his mother’s party differently. “There were 50 or 75 people there, Norman Mailer walked in. My father came in about 20 minutes later, took one look [at Mailer], and put h
is hat and coat back on and left.”6
The year 1955 proved to be Knopf’s most profitable yet, and a near record for American publishers in general. Knopf had released Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus; Randall Jarrell’s Selected Poems; Thomas Mann’s (unfinished) Confessions of Felix Krull; Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love; and their friend Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Age of Reform, a subtle view of America’s Populist movement in the 1890s and Progressive movement of the early twentieth century. By now, however, Blanche could see that Alfred was as interested in the West as in their book business. A few days before Christmas, he wrote to the National Park Service about what seemed the “substandard housing which [was all that was] available to many employees in the National Park Service.”7 He ended by saying how grateful he was to them, as they were always generous with their park planes when he visited. As difficult as he could be in the office, Alfred could be equally gracious when his beloved landscape was involved.
On January 29, 1956, H. L. Mencken, the man who, since 1915, had advised the Knopfs on the development of their company and been the one man loved equally by Blanche and Alfred, passed to what he would have joked had to be a better life. Newspapers remarked upon the quick, small service held that Tuesday at Witzke Funeral Home at the corner of Hollins and Gilmore in Baltimore, a half block from Mencken’s home. The guests included Alfred Knopf (Blanche was abroad) and James M. Cain representing the world of letters, along with Johns Hopkins’s pathologist Dr. Arnold Rich, the father of the poet Adrienne Rich. Mencken’s ashes were interred in Baltimore’s Loudon Park Cemetery next to his beloved Sara’s. A few months later Alfred would note in The Borzoi Quarterly (the irregularly published, handsomely designed chapbook about Knopf’s forthcoming books) that Mencken “was a very dear and intimate friend and had a greater influence on the Knopfs who publish books than anyone else who ever entered their lives.”8
In February, Alfred and Blanche created for Columbia University’s oral history project an account of Knopf’s early days. Though Blanche enjoyed recording anecdotal information about their beginnings, she was very focused on the present moment, in which Eleanor French would prove literally a lifesaver. By now Blanche’s vision was so impaired that her assistant made up reasons to accompany her as she crossed the street: French would suddenly remember something she needed to do and link arms with Blanche, both women leaving the office together.
As her own vulnerabilities mounted, Blanche grew increasingly aware of her employees’ needs. Pete Lemay remembers Blanche as “very courteous.” Her kind treatment of his wife included ensuring ahead of time that “Dorothy had a shawl when they went to dinner parties in Purchase … She wanted to be sure you were comfortable; she didn’t ignore you. That’s really all Blanche had to do for a colleague’s wife: to make her feel she was … not unwanted. Alfred could make anyone feel unwanted … [With Alfred] you never knew when you were going to get swatted. With Blanche, you knew you’d not be insulted.”9 When Pete was out for a week with chicken pox, she sent him fresh Italian grapes, and when his daughter was sick, she insisted he return home to tend to her. “Blanche was interested in what you were feeling; Alfred never was. That’s why writers liked her.”10
Just as Blanche learned that John Hersey was having marriage problems, Reader’s Digest published a heartfelt article by her old friend and author Paul Gallico about his. Gallico’s divorce perhaps caused Blanche to rethink how much effort she had put into her own marriage. Gallico (with whom she’d had an affair years before) assumed he’d been more or less happily wed for the past fourteen years, but his wife had suddenly left him. In Reader’s Digest he recounted the loss of sharing life with someone “who understood your every move.”11 Her regrets notwithstanding, after reflecting upon Gallico’s article Blanche must have wondered what life without Alfred would mean.
* * *
That fall, feeling stronger than she had for months, Blanche once again tried to participate in her husband’s love of the West. (Years later, Alfred’s early girlfriend Elsie Alsberg, still unable to resist a jab at Blanche, said that “Blanche went to parks with Alfred because she’d reached the point where she needed him badly.”)12 Eager for something to improve their relationship, she and Alfred took a trip with John and Frances Ann Hersey to Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon, on the Arizona-Utah state line, much of it within the Navajo Nation.
The trip was extremely pleasant, though Blanche was made nervous by some of the jagged landscapes they encountered. Alfred and Hersey kept copious notes, as did a government official who joined them at times, Dr. A. M. Mortensen. After eating a family-style dinner at Harry Goulding’s lodge (where the award-winning Stagecoach, with John Wayne, had been filmed in 1939), the Knopfs and Herseys were provided an official park plane. At first Mortensen had a bad impression of Blanche, who “had on heavy eye makeup, and she was talking in French to a scientist at the lunch table, and I thought that was rude … She took forever to eat her fish, and I didn’t like her till 1½ hours later, when I [suddenly] did.” Blanche, it seemed, was actually down-to-earth and self-deprecating, with “all the big and little fears and weaknesses everyone had.” She wasn’t afraid to laugh at herself. When Mortensen and “Mrs. Hersey were sauntering to the powder room, [we] encountered Blanche with a pack of Chesterfields in one hand and a book of matches in the other, and she had a cigarette in her mouth already lit … Three were lit and she was trying to light another one with both hands occupied; ‘I better quit this habit’ she said.”13
Alfred’s account was more focused on the wonders of nature.
We flew to Albuquerque then drove to Gallup, [three of us] stopping on the way to climb the steep and sandy road to the Acoma Pueblo of Willa Cather’s Death [Comes for the Archbishop]—a fine view, to be sure, but a rather shabby and shoddy place, with the Indians charging whatever they thought the traffic would bear for photographing them. They were neither attractive nor friendly. When we got down again, Blanche was sitting comfortably in the shade of a small building smoking a Chesterfield and chatting with an elderly Indian woman. She said that two or three men had stopped to offer to carry her up to the top if she wanted to go.14
Between Gallup and Canyon de Chelly, the foursome came upon Indian women with a flat tire, which Hersey helped them fix while the others went on ahead. Finally they all arrived at Chelly, where they obtained “crude accommodations” at Thunderbird Lodge. “A hired guide drove a Park Service 4-wheel drive wagon over a treacherous floor of canyon. Anything less than 4-wheel drive would sink into the sand and never be seen again,” Alfred recorded.15 Packing a picnic lunch, the four friends spent the next morning meandering through the Canyon del Muerto, lunching at the Mummy Cave. In the afternoon, they were taken to Rim Drive by a Forest Service guide, who ensured that their “view of the canyons and, later, the setting sun were absolutely superb,” Alfred observed. Finally, according to her husband, Blanche managed to relax. “The group spent one more day in the canyon” before moving on to Monument Valley. “Took pick, shovel & heavy rope for towing.”16
On their bus tour at Monument Valley the men became uncomfortable when Frances Ann, eventually joined by Blanche, made snide remarks about the tourists and their cameras—though, Alfred noted, “nobody took offense.” As the Knopfs set out for the top of Hoskininni Mesa, everything halted when Blanche lost one of her earrings. “Quite characteristically,” Alfred recalled, “she had chosen to wear in this wild and out-of-the-way place some [jewelry] made for her by Manhattan designer Seaman Schepps. [We] had to turn back and rake the ground around the [Indians’] fire. One earring found.”17
Then, using the park’s single-engine plane, they were flown to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Staying at Oak Creek Canyon in a small cabin, Hersey availed himself of the bountiful fishing while Blanche and Frances Ann complained about the primitive lodgings. When they all drove farther up the canyon, visiting Sunset Crater and Montezuma Castle, Alfred, at the wheel, got distracted by a sign
pointing to a golf club and hit a large rock, “leaving the handbrake broken for rest of trip.”18
In the following days, the foursome visited the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest, sections of Arizona and New Mexico, and crossed the border from El Paso to Juárez for dinner. A few handwritten notes Blanche sent friends suggest that she had been bearing up over the long three weeks—sort of. Alfred recalled only that “we had three very interesting weeks in the Southwest though Blanche came back in poor shape because she couldn’t stomach the food and literally starved herself.”19 But both Alfred and Blanche agreed that the Herseys were great company.20 John Hersey would fondly recall the trip as well, remembering how Blanche and Alfred kept “whistling and humming themes” from Schubert’s The Trout Quintet and from late Beethoven quartets, alternating stanzas to rescue each other from boredom while they were all trapped on a bus tour across the desert.21
* * *
Back home, in early 1957, Blanche launched a campaign for Albert Camus to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Calling in all her chips with foreign publishers, she sought their letters of endorsement for her adored European author. In October Blanche got word that he had won, in large part due to her lobbying, as everyone, including the writer, knew. Camus, with his American girlfriend, Patricia Blake, got the news while drinking coffee on the second floor of Chez Marius in Paris.22 The hard work done, Blanche immediately set about having a dress made for the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. Though she had cut back a bit on her trips abroad, she had kept up her relationships with French couturiers, and for Camus’s ceremonies in December she engaged Christian Dior and Balenciaga to create several outfits for her. She cabled Dior, “You have my measurements, can’t spend too much but it must be elegant,” and Dior offered her a silk dress in a “ravishing green faille” that was, “conveniently,” he assured her, on sale.
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