Even as she tended to all things concerning Knopf’s latest Nobel laureate, Blanche battled with Farrar, Straus and Cudahy over Carlo Levi’s Words Are Stones. To the last minute, the outcome was uncertain, negotiations “going by fast carrier pigeon to Rome at high noon,” according to accounts at FSG. The transaction “might mean that … dear Blanche Knopf will end up publishing C. Levi, but I am afraid that is in the lap of the gods, and will depend on the current condition of Carlo’s tummy.” Farrar, Straus assumed that Knopf was outbidding them; instead, the opposite was true and they, not Knopf, got the book.23 Jenny Bradley scolded Blanche for “taking too long to read books … taking too many months to consider them … Thus [you] occasionally lose one you want.”24 Nonetheless, that June Knopf published the three-volume Byron: A Biography by Leslie Marchand. The book had taken a decade to research and write. Like Newman Ivey White’s magnum opus on Shelley, Marchand’s Byron would be a long-lived presence on the Knopf backlist.
For two and a half weeks that summer, Alfred and Blanche traveled together again, though not with friends. The trip to Washington, Oregon, and northern Colorado was, Blanche wrote Jenny when they returned, “hot but interesting.”25 Alfred, in an interview with Susan Sheehan decades later, said it wasn’t true that Blanche rarely ate: “In the national parks, [we took] the fish we caught back to the hotel to be cooked for dinner, she ate those trout all right. I think she drank more bourbon than wine.” Pondering, he then decided that “she could have eaten much more than she ate … I think she had lost her appetite for food.”26
While they were out west, they turned over their Purchase home to their production manager, Sidney Jacobs, and his wife, knowing that the childless couple would act as caretakers while they got a break from the city. The Knopfs’ failure to offer Purchase to Pat and Alice and their now three children seemed a final blow to Pat, who would write his father a long letter about the grievances he had amassed over the years—from a failure to receive thank-you notes to not being invited to Purchase often enough.
But in 1957 Blanche was so excited about Camus’s triumph that she barely registered Pat’s complaints, which had persisted at least since he discovered her in the office with Hohe thirteen years earlier. She had always preferred to deal with matters she might influence—such as Bernard Berenson’s next book, which she was trying to acquire. When Blanche informed Berenson that she was going to Stockholm for Camus’s Nobel ceremony, the art connoisseur said, “You doubtless will meet his majesty, the King, and I hope the Queen as well. If you do, do not be ashamed of telling them you’re a dear friend of mine.”27
On December 3 Blanche flew to Paris, from where, with Camus (who was unable to fly due to lungs damaged by TB), his wife, Francine, and some of their friends, she took the Nord Express train to Stockholm. According to the Camus Society UK’s Simon Lea, Camus was living those days in a state of “partial asphyxiation” and had to “stop off at his doctor’s frequently to inhale oxygen.”28 Without it, he had severe panic attacks. He had spent the last months of 1957 in a state of near-constant anxiety.
When they met at the Gare de Vénissieux, Camus was wearing the Brooks Brothers coat Blanche had bought him, while she shocked more than one traveler with her green nail polish. Alfred arrived in Stockholm on December 9 on a direct flight from New York. The following day, at the City Hall in Stockholm, Blanche was called onto the dais when Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Photographs show her in a simple white wool Balenciaga coat dress, magnificently tailored, yet seeming to cling slightly when she walked, as if it were made of chiffon.
In his acceptance speech, Camus sought to align himself with the common citizen, first referring to the privileged position of the writer—while speaking of the responsibilities such privilege entails: “It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others.”29
Early in 1958, Camus wrote to Blanche to tell her that he was already hard at work on his autobiographical novel The First Man, which both he and his publisher believed would be his masterpiece, more personally inspired than any of his previous works. (It would be edited by his daughter, long after its publisher’s and author’s deaths.)
Around this time Knopf added to its small, select editorial staff their second full-time female editor, an attractive young talent in her twenties, Judith Jones.30 (By the early 1960s the roster of editors would also include Angus Cameron, Ash Green, Herbert Weinstock, Harold Strauss, and Patrick Gregory.)31 To this day, Jones is considered one of the great editors in the company’s history, having nurtured the talent of the young John Updike and Anne Tyler, among others. Hired in part for her perspicacity in pulling out of a slush pile Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (for Doubleday, where she then worked), Jones, through Bill Koshland and Herbert Weinstock, was now acquiring for Knopf Julia Child’s landmark cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. According to Pete Lemay, who had been hired as publicity director shortly before Judith arrived, Blanche was a bit envious of Jones’s youth and undoubtedly aware that Jones would inherit some of her dearest writers, such as John Hersey, Elizabeth Bowen, and Langston Hughes.32
Blanche, as usual, acted out her emotional neediness through her relationship with her dogs. Her poodle, ZZ, proved far less sturdy than Alfred’s. On September 14, 1959, four and a half years after she’d picked him up at the airport, Blanche wrote to Jenny Bradley:
ZZ succumb[ed] to convulsions in June, which Dr. Kinney, the vet, said would continue all his life. It is pretty difficult to see a little dog you love suffering with his legs going and frothing, biting his tongue in pain. I could not take it any longer, nor could Virgie [Blanche’s new maid], therefore I gave him very fast to Cecile [the previous maid] in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania who knows all about him. Knew him when he was a puppy. At the moment we are all in tears and it is curious that a small object like that should make such a deep impression on us … Virgie is in tears and I am, but we will probably get over it. As Virgie said, this is much worse than letting a [puppy] go, and I think she is right. Anyway, there it is and I have done it. As far as ZZ goes, I think he will be infinitely better off, though we will not.33
Blanche soon transferred her near obsession with ZZ to a new Yorkshire terrier, whom she would name Monsieur.
* * *
Soon afterward, she headed for Los Angeles to tend to book business and to see her sister-in-law, Mildred. She was picked up at the airport by a handsome, charming part-time driver who frequently transported Alfred when he came to town. Scotty Bowers—a gas station attendant, driver, bartender, and, as he now admits cheerfully, “pimp for the Hollywood crowd”—was immediately smitten with the “sweet little thing” who got into his limousine at Los Angeles International Airport. “It was a mutual attraction,” the ninety-two-year-old Scotty remembers, his striking good looks—thick white hair, cerulean eyes, and surprisingly buff body—still turning heads today as he signs copies of his memoir, Full Service.34 After he made a few carefully suggestive comments, Blanche invited him to her hotel room for a drink. They quickly became lovers, with Scotty recalling “how natural everything seemed from the start.” Blanche was “a pleasant enough looking woman and the chemistry between us was good.”35
Unlike Alfred, Scotty stresses, Blanche was never one of his “professional” customers, except for her use of his private limousine business. They simply reveled in each other’s company. To this day, Bowers is unsure if Blanche realized he also made arrangements for her husband. He assumes the Knopfs didn’t know about each other, although, as he pauses to reflect, he says, “Maybe they did. I had no proof of that, and whenever they were in town at the same time, they stayed at different hotels—the Beverly Hills or Beverly Wilshire.” Once again, as with her musicians, Blanche took a lover
who was connected to Alfred but whose affair with Blanche would be hers alone. “Mr. and Mrs. Knopf complemented each other,” Bowers remembers. “Different as night and day.”36
According to Bowers, Blanche seems to have had a real, if limited, romance with him. She “occasionally made trips out here from New York under the pretext that she was seeing friends, but it was really only to spend time with me,” he recalls proudly. When Blanche returned home, without fail she mailed Scotty a box of books “picked out specially” for him.37
23
A SON’S DEFECTION
A FEW DAYS BEFORE Pat Knopf left for his summer vacation in 1958 he asked Pete Lemay to read the galleys of a book his mother had bought in Paris, advising the head of sales, without Blanche’s knowledge, not to “waste” too much time promoting it. The history of a young Spaniard who had grown to manhood in a concentration camp, Child of Our Time by Michel del Castillo was instead endorsed, through Pete’s efforts, by readers ranging from Adlai Stevenson and Karl Menninger to Eleanor Roosevelt, and continued to sell well—though it was never a bestseller—year after year.1
“Knopf had fewer mediocrities on its list than most publishing houses,” Lemay points out. “What their imprint represented … was quality in literature,” he says. “They weren’t a huge commercial success,” since, as Lemay had discovered, “books with a skein of literary prizes didn’t necessarily sell lots of copies,” a reality the Knopfs accepted. “While Doubleday and Simon and Schuster issued several titles a year that sold over a hundred thousand copies, forty years of Borzoi books included no more than twelve books that sold at those levels by the mid-fifties.” Among these books, however, were hundreds of solid repeat sellers, creating Knopf’s economic stability through its backlist. From the start the couple had been determined to earn their keep by selling “good books” that would endure rather than “making a quick buck on the transitory success of a bad one.”2
Blanche was abroad on Easter weekend in 1959, when she opened the International Herald Tribune to read the startling news that her son was leaving Knopf and forming a new publishing house, Atheneum Publishers, with two partners. (On Sunday morning, March 15, The New York Times carried the story on its front page—unusual in the world of book publishing.) Despite Pat’s promise to his father not to release the news before his mother returned from Europe, Blanche hadn’t finished her winter buying trip when the story broke. She read how her son had joined the family business after the war, becoming company secretary and trade books manager, and subsequently vice president of sales, having been rewarded for helping create Knopf’s paperback division, Vintage—and now was ready to exit the publishing house. Later, Pat would blame the split on his mother, telling Peter Prescott that from the beginning of Vintage, there was fighting among the editors about which books to put into paperback, and Blanche especially argued hard for hers. According to Pat, the turmoil over running the imprint and fighting with his mother was what made him leave the firm that bore his last name.
The reality was a bit different: a few years earlier, Alfred and Blanche had, with disappointment on both sides, carefully admitted to each other and to their son that their long-expressed hope to turn Knopf over to him one day no longer seemed viable; they had changed their minds when they realized he did not possess the necessary skills (unlike the progeny of Charles Scribner) to run the company. Feeling betrayed by his parents, Pat began hatching plans for his own publishing house without their knowledge. Furious that his parents had reneged on what he considered his birthright, Pat started talking to industry friends who commuted with him from Westport to the city.
Just before Christmas in 1958, Pat authorized the veteran book men Simon Michael Bessie and Hiram Haydn to discuss with several investors the funding of a new publishing firm. Haydn, who had a secure job at Random House, had been slow to come on board and said no at first, while Bessie, having been passed over for top editor at Harper & Row, was eager to start anew. When Haydn suddenly surfaced with two wealthy friends ready to supply financial support, the millionaire William M. Roth and Marc Friedlaender, a Princeton professor with family money, everything jelled.3
By early March 1959, Pat, Bessie, and Haydn had secretly established Atheneum Publishers. Its first three lists would produce a trio of bestsellers: The Last of the Just (1960), a groundbreaking novel about the Holocaust by André Schwarz-Bart translated from the French; The Making of the President, 1960 (1961), the first in Theodore H. White’s iconic series on presidential campaigns; and The Rothschilds: A Family Portrait (1962), by Frederic Morton. Other books, if not bestsellers, also did well for the house in its early days, including Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), which sold more than seventy thousand copies in hard- and softcover editions.
According to several people who knew him in his new role of cofounder and chairman, Pat modeled his leadership after his father’s, down to the smoking of a pipe. But at social events, he was his mother’s son: better-looking than Alfred, he assumed the role of gracious host. His partner Hiram Haydn remembered that Pat was never still; social occasions at his home “kept him in perpetual motion.” He once “point[ed] at himself [in mock dismay,] saying ‘I’ve got Saint Vitus’s dance, for God’s sake.’” He worked at charming his guests every chance he had, cooing “from one to another, crying ‘Mary! Yum! How wonderful you look!… Barbara, you look beautiful, yum, yum … Helen, how great!’”4
Pat’s “desertion” wounded Blanche deeply, according to Frances Lindley, who remembered her talking incessantly about how betrayed she felt when she picked up the newspaper in London.5 Fortunately, at the time, Mildred Knopf was staying with Blanche at the Ritz, and her sister-in-law’s presence encouraged Blanche to handle the event gracefully. Still, Mildred recalled, “she was horribly offended—it was horribly hard—she was [most] upset because it made a fool of her” around people she knew in the business.6
Grace Dadd recalled that “it hit her below the belt … My feeling was that her face was smacked in public.”7 The last one to know, Blanche was humiliated.8
Furious at her son’s “abandonment” and her public mortification, Blanche had Pat locked out of his office. Until she cooled off, she wouldn’t even let him retrieve his personal items. (After she died, Alfred would tell an interviewer that it was the furtive way Pat made the break, not his decision itself, that had caused the schism.) Though at a superficial level, Blanche and Pat eventually reconciled, they remained suspicious of each other until the end of her life, and the feelings were passed down to the next generation. When Pat and Alice’s daughter Susan was five or six years old, and the family was staying overnight at “the Hovel,” Susan got up in the night and then ran back to bed when she saw Blanche standing in the dark, smoking a cigarette. She thought she was a witch, not her grandmother.
The day after the Sunday Times announced Pat Knopf’s new publishing venture, everyone on Knopf’s staff waited nervously for Alfred to return from Texas and Blanche from overseas. On Monday morning Pat arrived to find Bill Koshland, Joe Lesser, and Sidney Jacobs in a state. “Did Alfred know?” they yelled at him. As if, Pat said calmly, he would have done it without informing his father.9 When Alfred got home, he told Pat to vacate the office before his mother came back at the end of the week.
The Knopf editor Avis DeVoto (an early editor of Mastering the Art of French Cooking) wrote to Julia Child that they’d had “a positive earthquake of a turnover recently” when “Pat Knopf left his parents’ company and formed his own.”10 For years, according to Frances Lindley, Blanche would badmouth her son “as only someone deeply wounded could.”11 And yet, as Harding Lemay recalls, “once Atheneum was successful, Blanche was very proud of Pat.”12
Knopf’s publication on March 23 of Langston Hughes’s Selected Poems temporarily grounded Blanche, especially since Hughes agreed to exclude his radical socialist verse.13 Most reviewers lauded his gifts as a lyric poet with “the voice of pain and isolation, of a deeply felt
contemporary anguish,” though they often regretted “Hughes’ lapses of quality.”14 James Baldwin was vicious, however, his “nonchalant dismissal” payback for grievances and jealousies of the past. Wounded deeply, Hughes seemed the victim of an “Oedipal need: to slay the paternal figure in the field of black poetry.” Years later, Baldwin would regret his review, admitting he hadn’t even read the book.15
By midsummer, to celebrate paying off the thirty-year mortgage on the Purchase house, Alfred planned another trip out west. Hoping that shifting the attention to his conservation projects would help distract both him and Blanche from Pat’s defection, he suggested she accompany him. But Raymond Chandler had died that spring, his death removing the primary motivation for Blanche to endure the hardships of Alfred’s journeys. On July 17, she wrote Jenny that “I have vaguely promised to go to Wyoming until the 4th of September. You know I always try to get out of this.”16 Surely this time it was easy to beg off: she needed to tend to Elizabeth Bowen, widowed in 1952, who had recently lost Bowen’s Court due to bankruptcy. For the next five years, Bowen would have to take occasional academic jobs in Europe and America, even as she continued writing her novels.
* * *
These days, when Blanche gave editorial feedback to her writers, she was forced to share with them her secret: by 1959, using a magnifying glass to see the text was no longer optional. To respond to readers’ reports, which arrived on her desk single-spaced, Blanche’s assistant retyped their reactions, double-spaced at least.17 Her near-blindness was increasingly defining her life—she now consistently ate lunch nearby, and even so, she often asked someone to walk her. Five years earlier, Amy Loveman, a founding editor at The Saturday Review and an editor at the Book-of-the-Month Club, had actually talked Blanche into having lunch at the Algonquin. “There was all hell,” someone in the office remembered. Blanche claimed never to have been below Forty-Second Street in her life. Amy told her the Algonquin wasn’t below Forty-Second Street. “It’s still too far downtown,” Blanche said, before giving in.18 Now such a stroll would be impossible.
The Lady with the Borzoi Page 29