The Lady with the Borzoi Read online

  Blanche, Jewish but secular, was relieved that Alfred proved no more religious than she. An agnostic, he showed even less interest in his Jewish identity than did his father, Sam, who had at least joined Temple Emanu-El, Manhattan’s fashionable congregation, for the sake of appearances. Alfred’s indifference meshed with Blanche’s adult convictions and impatience with religion, which she increasingly believed did the world more harm than good. She and Alfred both disdained what was called Jewish society. Shopping on Rosh Hashanah, when she believed Manhattan stores to be less crowded, Blanche told disapproving friends that she had read too much about different cultures to believe in one spiritual authority.

  The somewhat reserved adolescent girl nonetheless managed to charm much of the Jewish community of Woodmere, near Lawrence on Long Island’s South Shore. In the 1970s, Elsie Alsberg, who before their marriage had known both Alfred and, less well, Blanche, recalled that the usually “solitary girl” occasionally “invited everyone” to her summer rental, supplying food, then joining in the singing and dancing, with a friend’s father driving some of the guests home in his luxurious seven-passenger Pierce-Arrow.14 The summer after graduation, in 1911, the seventeen-year-old made her debut at the Lawrence Athletic Club, where, at a party, she was formally introduced to Alfred Knopf. Despite her friends’ unkind whispers that they thought him unattractive and pedantic, Blanche enjoyed talking with him. A girl whose head was filled with exotic fables, she was drawn to his intellectual manner and self-possession. According to that young man’s memories, it took “another year or so” before they became “seriously interested in each other.”15

  Louis Davidson told his friend that if he himself didn’t already have a girl, he’d go after this “beaut” himself.16 With medium-length copper-red hair, opaque gray-green eyes, and a curvaceous body, Blanche looked like a pre-Raphaelite beauty.17 Another friend remembers her perfect manners, and that she “rarely spoke … absolute silence”—but that when she did, she had a “warm speaking voice.”18 Eventually she would become, when necessary, an artful speaker but an even more astute listener, her fluid, elegant low voice and her ability to concentrate major assets throughout her career.

  Years later, Blanche recalled how quickly she and Alfred became friends that summer of 1911. Alfred was delighted to keep company with such a practical girl, who, instead of “chatter,” liked to talk about books—or, more accurately, to listen to him talk about them. But she’d have to forgo his tutelage for a while: after graduating from Columbia University in early 1912, Alfred took off for Germany for a six-month tour. He had arranged an introduction in England to the distinguished writer John Galsworthy, who in 1921 was to become the first president of PEN (Poets, Essayists and Novelists), the writers’ organization that would eventually spread worldwide. Galsworthy was the subject of Alfred’s senior thesis—their fateful meeting going on to inspire the acolyte to publish great writing.

  As soon as he returned in June, the couple became an item, with Alfred working as an office boy for Doubleday. “Blanche knew exactly what I had been doing [figuring out the publishing world] when I started work at Doubleday’s; and she was an avid reader, filled with enthusiasm for and vitally interested in whatever involved books and the people who wrote them … And so [our] little firm was [soon] established,” Alfred would recall succinctly of the couple’s professional beginnings, entwined with the personal from the start.19 Blanche lauded Alfred’s decision to scuttle law school, his original plan, one he had not found exciting even when considering it before graduation. Publishing, Blanche felt sure, would allow a place for her, while the law would require a college degree followed by further professional training.

  Later she remembered how from its conception her relationship with Alfred was about books. Alfred “had [realized] I read books constantly and he had never met a girl who did. He was earning eight dollars a week [the equivalent of around $170 in 2015] … I saw him and [all we did was] talk books, and nobody liked him—my family least of all. But I did, because I had someone to talk books to and we talked of making books … We decided we would get married and make books and publish them.”20 Some girls dreamed about making babies, but Blanche and Alfred wanted to make books.

  “We never talked anything but books and music, music and books,” she recalled nostalgically in later interviews.

  I rode horseback with him occasionally, which was the only thing I had ever done all my life apart from playing the piano and studying … I talked to my parents seriously [about marrying Alfred] and they wouldn’t hear of it. There were twelve other men around I could marry but not this one. Not only because he was a Russian Jew [Alfred was in fact born in the United States] but, according to my family, his family of poor reputation, [was] not [meant] for me … [Still I was determined to] marry him and publish books.21

  If Blanche brought to the table a life that lacked excitement, Alfred supplied all the drama anyone could want, his harrowing childhood and history affecting Blanche’s future as much as his own. Sam Knopf, born in a Warsaw suburb in 1862, had reason to be proud, and seeing the esteem in which Alfred clearly held him, Blanche, too, admired the father. By the time she met him, he had become director of one of New York City’s small mercantile banks.22

  But Alfred knew, firsthand, that life had been hard for Sam, the youngest of seven children. In spite of its longtime anti-Semitic policies, Poland enjoyed a liberal period when the Haskalah, a Jewish form of the Enlightenment, enabled a good life for Sam’s parents: Abraham Knopf taught English at the University of Warsaw, while his wife, Hannah, earned a chemistry degree.23 By the late 1860s, however, anti-Semitic abuse prompted the Knopfs to flee the country and move to America. From the ship’s arrival sprang the first of many probably apocryphal stories about the Knopf family, forming a legend both Alfred and Blanche encouraged: in what would be his five or six incomplete autobiographies, Alfred would consistently record that Abraham and Hannah, departing from the eastern frontier of western Russia, traveled by way of Manchuria to San Francisco, where they stopped to visit friends, the grandparents of Jascha Heifetz, the future violinist (later to become Blanche’s lover), then sailed a wildly out-of-the-way route around the Horn to reach New York City in l873.24

  When Abraham Knopf died a year after arriving in America, like his wife unable to find a teaching job, their daughters agreed that even the youngest in the household would have to earn money to help support the family. By the time Sam was twelve, he had dropped out of school to be raised by his married sister in Houston, where he would become the quintessential entrepreneurial American of the late nineteenth century. Formal education was out of the question. Alfred would say of his father that Sam had taught himself “everything,” including the history of Judaism. His son admired his father’s homage to the “people of the book,” an identity associated with Jewish people that had been passed down by Sam’s parents. “With very little schooling he became a literate and … civilized adult,” said Alfred, “buying sets of the French and Russian classics illustrated with full color plates galore and bound in three quarters red morocco,” an aesthetic the son would replicate.25

  Sam Knopf got his citizenship papers in 1893, shortly after Alfred Abraham Knopf, the first child of Sam and Ida Japhe, was born on September 12, 1892, at the Knopfs’ home at 234 Central Park West. Alfred’s mother was from a Latvian Jewish family that had settled in Manhattan in time for Ida’s own birth, making her a first-generation American. A former student of the schoolteacher would write Alfred in 1949 that although “plain,” she was “splendid” in personality and “had that wonderful facility of being able to impart [her knowledge] to the immature mind. I loved her.”26

  His friends all agreed that Sam deserved a good wife, and the canny man knew that marriage to Ida would ensure his American citizenship. A natty dresser with a stickpin always in his tie and suits “a shade too well-cut,” as an aristocratic friend confided, the man was “a little sharp.”27 At five feet, ten and a half inc
hes, the exact height his son Alfred would reach, Sam was proud of his trim physique. As an adult, Alfred would imply that his father had been one for the ladies, whom he easily met and befriended while plying his trade. Sam had become a salesman, traveling the Northeast by stagecoach, in which he carried samples of clothing and miniature models of furniture supplied him by eight or ten manufacturers.28 By working nonstop, he would become well-off, through the connections he curried as much as the social skills he honed. He was so successful that he was hired as the manager of a large Manhattan clothing store, Bierman, Heidelberg & Co., and near the time of Alfred’s birth was offered the chance to open a branch in Cincinnati. Alfred, who throughout his life idolized his father, called him “a very strangely remarkable person.” He never understood how Sam became accepted in gentile circles, an influential financial counselor to important businesses.29 Nor how he became a member of clubs that usually didn’t admit eastern European Jews, who were not members of “our crowd,” the term the author Stephen Birmingham coined in describing the prejudice among Jewish society, including millionaire magnates such as the Guggenheims, the Loebs, and the Belmonts. But such mystery only encouraged Alfred to hold his father in awe.

  In 1894 the Knopfs decamped for the Midwest, where, the local paper reported, Sam quickly became “a social favorite.” They lived in a smart area of town, Walnut Hills, their elaborately landscaped Victorian home on Lincoln Avenue a scene of swank gatherings. Alfred’s first memory was of walking along a bluff over the Ohio River “with a Negro manservant.” On March 17, 1895, Ida gave birth to a daughter, Sophia Celeste, usually called Sophie.30 In Cincinnati, Sam’s mounting prosperity allowed him to open his own wholesale clothing business, Samuel Knopf & Co., at Fifth and Race Streets. Increasingly he found reasons to travel, leaving the young Ida alone in their large house with the babies. Sam dismissed her complaints about boredom and loneliness, deserting her (as she saw it) for months at a time.

  In July 1896, Sam sent Ida, Alfred, and Sophie, together with a servant, to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. A Jewish family, even a wealthy one, couldn’t or wouldn’t vacation at the new Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, or at the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, but there were desirable places available to the Knopfs just the same. Sam lodged Ida and their young children at the Grand Hotel in Rockbridge Alum Springs.

  Though it proved almost as warm in Virginia as it was back home, Ida wrote brightly to Sam that at least “the air is always fresh and pure.” In a letter to a Cincinnati friend the young woman confided that “the place is full of Southerners … A very refined class of people extend the courtesies of the day, and that is all.”31 Despite the cheerful countenance she presented to her husband, Ida was depressed among the throng of vacationers. From Sam’s reputation as a ladies’ man, Ida must have worried about his fidelity to her even before their marriage, but she adored him. Now, nine days after she wrote both Sam and a friend that she was terribly lonesome, she finally got the attention she craved.

  * * *

  On July 25, 1896, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer, friends at the summer camp summoned Sam: “Come immediately.” That morning, a servant maintained, “there was a man in the cottage, and he was in Mrs. Knopf’s room.” Believing him to be a burglar, the maid had run shrieking from Ida’s bungalow.32

  According to a second newspaper, The Commercial Tribune, almost from the day that Sam Knopf delivered his family to the springs and then went his way, guests at the resort had been aware of a Peoria businessman spending an unseemly amount of time with Mrs. Knopf. To all admonitions, she “turned a deaf ear, and pursued the folly of her way.” Upon Sam’s arrival at the camp, the Tribune claimed, the husband’s inquiries quickly resulted in “a confession signed by [Ida] in which she admitted her guilt … He also obtained the statements of the man in the case” regarding Ida’s infidelity, which caused “[Mr. Knopf] to send his wife and their children to New York, where they have been ever since. Mr. Knopf and his wife have not lived together since that occurrence,” the reporter noted.33

  Ida took Alfred and Sophie to her parents’ modest house in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, while Sam remained in Cincinnati. He sold his business, gave up the elegant house on Lincoln Avenue, and went to live at his clubs. According to the Enquirer,

  He ordered a sale [at auction] of the effects in his magnificently furnished home. Everything in it was sold at prices that did not represent one fiftieth of its real value. Previous to the sale, he had forwarded an ad of household effects to his semi-divorced wife … From almost the very hour that the separation took place Mrs. Knopf did everything in her power to effect a reconciliation. Scarcely a day passed in which a letter was not received begging forgiveness. Some of them were pathetic in their pleading. The disgraced wife offered to come back as a menial and scrub his floors. “I will be your dog if you will only let me remain under your roof,” she wrote. He was obdurate and steadily declined to answer any of the letters.34

  At 11:20 on the morning of February 12, 1897, Ida Knopf went to A. F. Underwood’s drugstore on Bath Avenue, where she bought two ounces of carbolic acid, a sweet-smelling clear liquid, for use, she assured the druggist, as a disinfectant. At 2:00 the next morning, Dr. E. H. Mayne was called to the house. All the doctor could do was to tell the woman screaming in pain that it would be over soon.

  Into his old age, Alfred was troubled by the memory of that night. Not yet five, the child knew there had been difficulties between his parents since the previous summer, when he witnessed the tensions at the Virginia retreat. On this freezing February night, he had awakened to hear loud voices and servants running in the hallway outside his room. When he realized something terrible was happening, he hid under the covers. The Brooklyn Sunday Eagle reported that Dr. Mayne “found Mrs. Knopf suffering great internal pain. The physician resorted to all known remedies, but at 11:30 p.m. yesterday the woman died.” Ida was thirty-three years old; her agony had ended in death the evening before Valentine’s Day.35

  An anonymous source told the police that “Ida had been suffering for a long time from an incurable disease; believing she would never be well again, she killed herself.” The story held for three days, and when inquiries were made to Sam, back in Cincinnati, he feigned shock: he had visited his wife in her Bensonhurst home the Friday she bought the acid, finding her as happy as ever, with “everything her heart could wish for.”

  Mr. Knopf neglected to mention to the reporter that on the prior Monday in the Cincinnati Court of Common Pleas, he had filed a suit for divorce from Ida on grounds of adultery. He had not informed Ida until Friday morning, when he briefly visited her Brooklyn apartment. She then walked to the pharmacy and bought the poison. The Cincinnati papers, which stressed the prominence of the Knopfs in “Jewish society,” printed the full story as soon as Ida’s suicide was revealed: Sam’s wife had been named in the divorce papers as an adulteress who was expected to yield custody of her children and to relinquish her husband’s name. Ida Japhe was buried at the Union Fields cemetery in Bath Beach on February 17, 1897. Neither Alfred nor his sister, Sophie, would remember their mother very clearly, and Sam would not speak of Ida again. Alfred spoke directly of her to Blanche just once, early in their marriage, and she would never forget the expression on his face as he told her the story.

  Sam moved back to New York City, remarrying a year later. Lillian Harris would prove a loving stepmother. The family lived in a large wood-frame house in Washington Heights, in the upper reaches of Manhattan, considered in the last years of the century to be the “country.” Its solitude and relief from what happened in Brooklyn left their mark on Alfred forever, creating a lifelong desire to live outside New York City. Lillie, however, would go unappreciated by both her husband and her stepchildren, who later complained that she was “not very smart” (but, Sam always added, very sexy). The family became quite a mixed brood—Bertha, a girl from Lillian’s previous marriage, who took “Knopf” as her last name,
together with Alfred and Sophie, and a child, Edwin, born of Sam and Lillie’s marriage.

  In different combinations, the children were farmed out to friends and relatives during summers and holidays, allowing Sam and Lillie to take vacations on their own. Sam often combined work with play, a routine Alfred would replicate when he became a parent. When the children did accompany their parents on car trips, Lillie in particular would gently chastise young Alfred for focusing on a book instead of looking at the scenery. But the boy formed his own opinions and kept on reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles or his “lowbrow” favorite, Sherlock Holmes—books being the safest, most soothing world he could imagine.

  2

  THE BOOK LOVERS

  DECADES AFTER SHE AND ALFRED WED, Blanche would tell her sister-in-law Mildred Knopf that her marriage had hinged on a pre-engagement promise she extracted: Alfred had to make Blanche an equal partner in the publishing company they’d dreamed of creating from the start of their courtship.1 Unusual for its time, such an arrangement was especially gutsy for a girl just figuring out what she wanted from life—let alone knowing how she would achieve it. But for all her prenuptial savvy, Blanche was crazy about the very well-read twenty-two-year-old Alfred Knopf.

  Throughout their courtship, Alfred assumed the unofficial role of Blanche’s tutor, his way of expressing his love for her, she decided. He had derided the modern art that secretly interested her—especially the Fauvism, Futurism, and Cubism that were promoted at the city’s early-winter exhibit at the 69th Regiment Armory. Officially titled “International Exhibition of Modern Art,” the 1913 show, organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, would come to be known as “the Armory Show.” Though the exhibit would be in New York City for only a month, its outsize impact had conservative critics howling at what they considered the preposterous loss of the traditional figure that had grounded almost all art to this point, with Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) usually deemed the show’s most revolutionary piece. The brochure featured part of an earlier abstract “poem” by Gertrude Stein called “Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia,” which the flamboyant Dodge, who had befriended Stein in Paris, distributed at the show. Admired for the weekly salon she held in her new apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue, Dodge counted among her crowd Carl Van Vechten, soon to become one of Blanche’s closest friends. Van Vechten would introduce Blanche to Stein and to Max Eastman, a Greenwich Village radical who financed the journalist and activist John Reed’s trip to Russia. (The loss of Reed, Mabel Dodge’s lover, caused Dodge to eat figs studded with glass and to swallow laudanum, from which the sturdy woman promptly recovered.)