The Lady with the Borzoi

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  To the original four, plus the two they’ve brought to the journey, and to the only one who could navigate such a brilliant but disparate crew.

  Without you, nothing.

  Books succeed,

  And lives fail.

  —ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

  Odi et Amo. (I hate and I love.)

  —CATULLUS

  INTRODUCTION

  LEFT OFF HER COMPANY’S MASTHEAD but called by Thomas Mann “the soul of the firm,” Blanche Knopf—the name she would always prefer to Mrs. Alfred A. Knopf—began her career in 1915 as cofounder of the company that just celebrated its hundredth anniversary. She quickly began scouting for her fledgling publishing house quality French novels she’d get translated, such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. Soon she would help Carl Van Vechten launch the literary side of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing works by Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen, while she also nurtured and often edited such significant authors as Willa Cather, Muriel Spark, and Elizabeth Bowen. Through Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, she legitimized the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction. H. L. Mencken was among her writers and closest friends. She acquired momentous works of journalism such as William Shirer’s Berlin Diary, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and the work of the investigative reporters James “Scotty” Reston and Edward R. Murrow. She introduced to American readers international writers whom she met and had translated into English, among them Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir.

  Intelligent, voracious, seductive, and hardworking, the petite woman who dressed in designer clothes and oversized, colorful jewelry was determined not to be overlooked or easily categorized. A “mongrel,” she joked, like her frequent companion George Gershwin, who mixed “the vocabulary of serious music with that of the dance halls,” she was seen by her friends as witty, loyal, and straightforward.1

  Her career spanned the years from World War I to the 1960s. In 1915, when she started the company with Alfred Knopf, her twenty-two-year-old fiancé, Blanche, two years younger, believed her future as a publisher to be guaranteed through a prenuptial verbal pact she made with Alfred that they would be equal partners. (As the literary historian John Tebbel has said, “In 1915, Alfred A. Knopf and Blanche Wolf, later his wife, founded the firm that bears his name.”)2 But once they married, the “mutual understanding” was disregarded. Eventually Alfred would explain unconvincingly that because his father planned to join them at the firm, her name could not be accommodated: three names on the door would be excessive. Moreover, she would own just 25 percent of the company while Alfred owned the rest.

  Blanche realized that the promise of parity she’d been made was false: she would have to rely on herself. It’s unlikely that in 1915 she was aware of any other women who were part of her profession. There were a few, such as Caro M. Clark, who in the early twentieth century breached the prejudice against advertising in the book world; and Elizabeth Peabody, who published Transcendentalist authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. Neither Clark nor Peabody, who died the year Blanche was born, was active by the time Blanche began her career. But the start of World War I would further the changes already under way in the publishing world, as the field was evolving from a gentleman’s occupation into a business enterprise. Less obviously, but at least as significant, “in an age when white men controlled the narrative,” Blanche stood at what Stacy Schiff, in Cleopatra, calls “one of the most dangerous intersections in history: that of women and power.” Closer in time to Blanche were Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson, who exemplify, according to their biographer, Susan Hertog, the dangers of “speaking truth to power.”3

  * * *

  At the beginning of the war, due to a scarcity of high-quality paper, the patrician houses Macmillan, Houghton Mifflin, Doubleday, and Little, Brown, as well as Henry Holt and Scribner’s, two of the oldest, turned from releasing trade books to promoting textbooks, with their greater profit margin. Blanche and Alfred began acquiring previously published works from England (often translations of Russian and German books), reprinting them (under loose early-century copyright laws), and spending their money on hard-to-find fine paper instead of on authors. The Bolshevik Revolution, followed by Russia’s withdrawal from World War I, allowed Knopf’s Russian books, cheap to obtain, to accrue some small cachet. Russian authors dominated the new company’s first five years, proving important to the publishers because they helped establish Knopf as “one of the very few American publishers interested in European books.”4 Yet, as the historian Richard Hofstadter has said, “it was not republishing the Russians which was to distinguish the firm, but bringing to America the work of writers like Mann … Sartre, Camus and others”—all three Blanche’s authors.5 The Langston Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad claims, “A brilliant woman living somewhat in the shadow of her lordly husband, Alfred, she signed up most of the writers, especially the foreigners, who made Knopf a prestigious as well as a profitable imprint.”6

  Still, by the time Alfred died in 1984, Blanche had somehow disappeared from Knopf’s history. Asked seven years after her death about Blanche’s role in their company, Alfred lamented that she’d never been properly recognized: “She had, as I realize more and more, a very big finger in the pie.”7 Continuing, he admitted that “she had a very considerable influence on the list, [even signing Knopf’s books by musicians] … I realize it more now than when she was alive.”8 He was not the only one to recognize Blanche after her death: the highly regarded defense lawyer in the Scottsboro case, Osmond Fraenkel, whose wife had known Blanche since they were both children, acknowledged that he hadn’t liked Blanche particularly and had failed to take her seriously. Upon late-life reflection, however, the defender of civil liberties who fought more than one battle for the publishing world realized that “she was indispensable to the business.”9 The essayist Joseph Epstein has written, “I’ve long been fairly certain that Blanche was the more interesting character.”10

  Indeed. She made up for being kept on the sidelines—in part by turning her husband’s lack of sexual interest into her own liberation. She ripped through the Roaring Twenties, partying with friends like the Fitzgeralds and Sinclair Lewis, whom she thought too unreliable to publish in spite of their genius (they would go to more established publishers with less to lose than the Knopfs), and sleeping with the most prominent conductors and musicians of the age. She maneuvered through World War II by flying into, not away from, battle. The writer and Knopf publicist Harding “Pete” Lemay, who knew Blanche during the last ten years of her life, remembers that “she was an extraordinary person, a woman against all odds of her time and her specific place. She invented herself so early, when she was so young.”11

  PART ONE

  1

  HUNGRY FOR ADVENTURE

&n
bsp; FROM HER LATER ACCOUNTS, she only pretended to be calm, smiling graciously as she boarded the C-47. The slight sway of her walk gave her an aura of confidence, though it came from a shot of bourbon she’d secretly swallowed before takeoff. Saluted by the handsome young lieutenant about to lift her over the gap between the plane’s body and its metal steps, she was taken aback until she remembered that she wore a uniform.1 It was 1943, and for this flight, the army had designated Blanche a lieutenant colonel. The alcohol and a set of earplugs allowed her to fall asleep despite the noisy engine, and she was in Newfoundland before she knew it. Once in London, she changed into her civilian clothes. Routine bombing had been occurring nightly in the aftermath of the Blitz, and only hours after she’d arrived, an air raid siren blasted the air. She was having a drink at Claridge’s, just a few blocks down from the Ritz, where she was staying, “both places miraculously intact.” Blanche wrote that she “crossed the road and went upstairs to my room. I sat all dressed up in a wool dress, my handbag and my papers at my side, and worked with a splitting headache. Heard a lot of noise … About a quarter to twelve there was a siren, and I [went downstairs where the reporters were gathered and asked], ‘Is the air raid starting now?’” Everybody laughed, Blanche’s mistake providing the most levity the reporters had known in weeks. “The siren was the all clear … After that I never paid any attention to the raids. What I did was pull the blankets up over my ears and go back to sleep.”2

  Though it was supposedly fully booked, the Ritz, where half the war correspondents were staying, somehow made room for Blanche. The day of her arrival she had rushed through the lobby during a blackout, accompanied by a British literary agent carrying flowers that an anonymous admirer had left for the publisher at the front desk. In the week that Blanche remained in London, she would share drinks and dinners (early, “because no buses ran after nine”) with journalists, writers, and friends, including Edward R. Murrow, the CBS broadcast journalist. She would later publish a collection of his broadcasts that included his wartime coverage, but for now she was pleased that he had agreed the previous year to provide a blurb for a first book, Prelude to Victory, by Blanche’s young author the reporter James B. “Scotty” Reston. At Reston’s request, she had edited the book personally instead of handing it over to one of the first-rate house editors, and Knopf published it in 1942.

  * * *

  Born on July 30, 1894, in a pleasant but unprepossessing Upper West Side brownstone, she spent most of her premarital life on the Upper East Side at 40 East Eighty-Third Street, where the family moved after her birth—or at the Gardner School, on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth Streets. Founded in 1860 by a Baptist minister, Gardner was aimed primarily at well-off Jewish girls, as well as at non-Jews lacking the social clout to attend the more exclusive all-girls schools, such as Chapin or Brearley. The writer Mary Craig Kimbrough, who in 1913 married Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, had attended Gardner a few years before Blanche. Such an alliance for a southern girl from Mississippi suggests that Gardner was liberal leaning.

  Like other young ladies being groomed for marriage, Blanche followed her well-meaning parents’ agenda: taking piano and riding lessons in the mornings and studying French after school, when she was tended by a German nanny. Gardner allowed Blanche to escape a dull home, her pleasant but somewhat distant mother and father not being particularly interested in books or cultural life. Her brother wasn’t much company, either. Eight years older, Irving was rarely around, except, as he matured, to persuade their father to back his latest business venture.

  But at Gardner, Blanche entered an enchanted universe. A six-story French Renaissance building with modern conveniences, from electricity to elevators to its own filtration plant, Gardner thrilled Blanche with its winding white marble staircase that led to an endless array of grand bookcases.3 These were filled with books that fed all sorts of fantasies, in particular nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, and other literary masters. Her classmates would remember her as well liked but primarily a loner—some thought her shy, others a snob.4 While giggling classmates ran up and down the school stairs, Blanche stationed herself at the bottom, reading. Through her brother’s wife, Irma, Blanche met Paula Herzig, Irma’s cultivated sister, who taught her to value French literature in particular. Soon Paula was speaking French with Blanche and taking her to concerts to hear the Impressionist music of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and even Frederick Delius.5

  Blanche’s childhood friend Rita Goodman Bodenheimer told an interviewer that after graduation from Gardner, Blanche changed, her “thoughts now only in the book world,” but in reality such preoccupation was hardly a swerve from her interest while in school. Bodenheimer recalled that until Blanche met Alfred Knopf, she was “satisfied with being alone or with a few friends,” but then “she decided her old friends were frivolous.” She resolved to “improve herself,” and she refused all beaux and walked her Boston terrier by herself, often reading along the way.6

  Such stories were told—often by envious schoolmates—fifty years after the fact. In addition to the primacy of reading, however, they do suggest themes that would define Blanche throughout the years, from her penchant for living alone to her love of dogs. She liked to make up parts of her life, too, later recounting little of her family that proved true—her fantasies and embellishments still glimpsed in Knopf’s house histories and reference books today. One of the publisher’s oft-repeated tales referred to her father, Julius Wolf, as a “gold jeweler from Vienna,” though his immigration papers reveal that he was a farmer or day laborer (“Landmann”) in Bavaria. Blanche’s father abandoned farming during the immigration waves of the 1870s, a few years before yet another decree against Jews occurred. At the behest of a relative already settled in the New World, in 1877 Julius holed up in steerage and traded Hamburg for New York City. Through distant cousins working in a small Manhattan business, the clever newcomer mastered the making and selling of cloth and before long became a major manufacturer of caps and baby hats. By 1882 he was part owner of Sonn and Wolf, a millinery company that designed and made ruffles and trimmings. Julius left the business only months before it went bankrupt, luck or instinct determining his fate once again.

  Bertha Samuels, Blanche’s mother, had inherited money just in time to offer a solid dowry to Julius, following the custom of the day. Bertha’s father, Lehman Samuels of Manhattan, along with his brother, was the country’s largest exporter of beef and live cattle until 1877. That year, even as Julius Wolf sailed to America, Samuels Brothers became a casualty of the country’s “Long Depression,” one of the eighteen thousand American businesses and banks—and ten states—that went bankrupt, caught in the financial debacle of 1873–79.7 The New York Times reported that the demise of the Samuelses’ firm, held in the highest esteem, shocked its customers.8 But, working ceaselessly, by 1885 Lehman Samuels had made his fortune back.9

  When Blanche was born in 1894, family finances were again on solid ground. The Wolfs soon moved into their home on the refined Upper East Side. There Julius, with his noticeable accent, habitually deferred to Bertha, who, as a first-generation American, cheerfully dominated the household. “Julius looked very jolly,” Blanche’s cousin remembered: “short, round, with ruddy cheeks and dancing brown eyes,” even though he was also “austere—a typical German,” she added.10 The few surviving photographs suggest a cheerful if rotund adult, the parent who, according to one of Blanche’s breezy and improbable stories, would gladly take Blanche and a cousin to Paris for their high school graduations.

  Bertha Samuels Wolf was a stout, self-possessed matriarch who proudly told Blanche that no one would have guessed her own father had run a slaughterhouse. Pictures of Blanche and her mother show two women laughing together heartily, not the stark family image recalled by those interviewed after Blanche’s death. One of Blanche’s early friends, Helene Fraenkel, dismissed Bertha Wolf as “exceedingly pretty but littl
e and so fat that she was square.” The Wolfs’ lack of interest in the arts led Blanche, Fraenkel maintained, to seek “someone intellectual to marry.”11

  Though Bertha, like her husband, at times could be remote, she managed to teach Blanche the importance of self-presentation. Bertha dressed well, favoring what would later be called “the Jewish uniform”: smart, tailored black suits (in the 1920s made to order by the emerging couturier Sally Milgrim), always adorned with a string of pearls. One relative thought that Bertha looked like Lillian Russell when she was young and that Julius looked like “a typical butter-and-egg man.”12 Whatever their appearance, the egg man’s determination, as well as his wife’s inheritance, enabled his daughter, years later, to adopt the attitude of those who came from wealth. Still, neither Julius nor Bertha was inclined to support a college education for either of their children, especially their daughter. Blanche does not seem to have considered going beyond high school, though Barnard (along with other colleges) had been available to women since the late 1880s. In her case, the conjugal wait after she finished Gardner would deliver her a profession, if male-inflected from its beginning. As one scholar notes, “Blanche would launch an esteemed career in literary publishing,” guided by a man whose male professors were trained in a canon that emphasized male authors.13

  By the time she graduated from Gardner, Blanche had already set her sights on marrying the muscular, olive-skinned Alfred Knopf. Blanche found him attractive not least because, like her, he preferred books to people, reading voraciously at Columbia University and, during college breaks, at beaches on the South Fork of Long Island. Blanche had occasionally spoken to the athletic boy in Lawrence, on Western Long Island, where he lived on his father’s estate.