The Lady with the Borzoi Read online

  As a woman in an era immersed in Freudian psychology, Blanche already seems to have realized how incomplete the sexual side of her marriage was destined to be, and she more or less gave up on it, though she continued to show Alfred affection. She loved to ride horses with him in Central Park, before they went into the office.

  During their courtship, when he realized how important riding was to her, Alfred had enlisted in the National Guard, the First Field Artillery based in the armory at Broadway and West Sixty-Sixth Street. He was given free riding lessons in case the war across the ocean needed him. Now he could please his wife with his new prowess while receiving credit for national service. He even regaled Blanche with stories of being thrown from his horse and suffering his sergeant’s ire.

  If Alfred rode in part to satisfy Blanche, he more often found himself in the role of teacher, tutoring her in classical music, about which she knew little. When playing the piano as a child, she had been an indifferent student. In contrast, she paid attention when she and Alfred attended concerts several times a week, usually at Carnegie Hall or at the Philharmonic Society of New York (now the New York Philharmonic), or even in Philadelphia or Boston. A young virtuoso who impressed everyone, including Blanche, was the violin prodigy Jascha Heifetz, descendent of those acquaintances of Alfred’s grandparents, now making his Carnegie Hall debut at age sixteen.41

  At her mother’s insistence, concertgoing was cut short for decorum’s sake when Blanche became visibly pregnant. On May 19, 1918, eight months along, she wrote her peripatetic husband about being in the office without him: “Babe—I’m counting the nights—four—that you’re still to be away—and then I’ll have you back with me Reuben for a little while.” Blanche continued, almost frantically: “Goodnight my precious Reuben or Good morning. All my heart is with you. Your ownest V.V. in the world.”42 From various comments throughout the years, it appears that Alfred had been stricken with the Spanish flu and barely recovered before embarking on his latest sales trip.43 Worried about his health, Blanche didn’t seem concerned about her own susceptibility, though she must have been nervous about the baby.

  She was of two minds about the forthcoming event (her maternal grandmother had died in childbirth), and almost certainly she sensed her husband was ambivalent about such matters. The age itself seemed unsure. Margaret Sanger had recently dared to link contraception and women’s rights, arguing that women no longer had to become mothers: it was a matter of choice.44

  Blanche’s self-consciousness about her appearance, particularly the excessive weight she seemed to be gaining during the pregnancy, convinced her to accept her mother’s offer to have a corset made—“a very elaborate affair which I wore one day and discarded.” Soon after, she stopped going into the office, but she was willing to encounter people who didn’t know her. She simply had too much energy to allow her appearance to override all her activities: “I took stenography [courses] in White Plains. I had no car so I had to take a trolley up to White Plains … When I came home I would take the Russian wolfhound for a walk. Then I would do everything which was sent up from town. I read the manuscripts, which were all routed to come straight to Hartsdale instead of 220 West 42 St. At night [Alfred and I] would work on advertising and we would discuss the manuscripts I had read. It was quite a busy life.”45

  From her difficulty wearing the pregnancy corset, to the insult of a neighbor’s asking for her due date—after the baby had been born—the experience caused Blanche to go on an essentially lifelong diet. She would also contrive birth narratives to suit the needs of the moment. In her most fantastic version, neither she nor her doctor even realized she was pregnant. One day, after Alfred went to work, Blanche, allegedly surprised by stomach pains, went to the hospital, where, to everyone’s amazement, Pat was born. In another version, one she told a fully grown Pat in the midst of an argument, she shouted at the nurse holding her newborn son, “Take him away and don’t bring him back again. And they took ‘this thing’ away.”46

  The reality was more mundane. In his diary entry for June 17, 1918, Alfred wrote that “V.V. woke me with pains at 6. Pretty bad by 7 when she phoned Ryan [their driver] to come around. To town on 8:01 [train]. Worried and still feeling rotten from my cold.” Blanche, apparently believing herself to be in false labor but acknowledging she couldn’t be sure, had told Alfred to go to work: she was leaving for White Plains Hospital but would be back within the day. Instead, after a five-hour labor their child, Alfred A. Knopf, Jr. (“Pat”), was born.47 Years later, Alfred’s editorial corrections to Blanche’s nine pages of notes she wrote when Pat was an adult—subtly changing “took ‘this thing’ away” to “took ‘the thing’ away”—perhaps cloaked his uneasiness with his wife’s seemingly unmaternal sentiments by not even allowing a demonstrative pronoun to stand.

  In keeping with the times, Blanche stayed in the hospital for nearly two weeks after Pat’s birth. Like other “modern women” of her era, she considered nursing a child a “disgusting physical act,” but she tried it anyway, only to give up when Alfred blamed Pat’s crying on her nervousness. Typical of men in this period, Alfred participated little in the baby’s care, later remembering only a few anecdotes about the mother and son’s first night home: the father went to bed at 11:10, according to his diary, with Pat wailing in the guest room, where Blanche slept. In his next entry, he reported that “Pat, they say, cried till 1 a.m.” On July 4, three weeks after his son’s birth, Alfred, before heading off for a nine-mile hike alongside their new boxer and the single borzoi they had trained, watched Blanche give Pat his first bath.48

  More than fifty years after Pat’s birth, Angeles “Toni” Pasquale, an office worker and sometime personal assistant to Blanche, told the writer Susan Sheehan that once, when Alfred was out of town, he forgot the “little diary” that he kept on his desk, and, snooping, the employee read it. After Alfred described giving “the baby its 2 A.M. feeding,” he wrote, “Blanche says I don’t love her but I do.” Perhaps Alfred deliberately left his journal where he knew Blanche would see it, his poignant if tortured way of saying “I love you.”49

  3

  A THIRD KNOPF

  BLANCHE RETURNED TO WORK within weeks of Pat’s birth, fearing that Sam might try to push her out of the company if she took much time off. She hired a baby nurse, Fraulein Hanover, whose qualification for child care appears to have been her position as wardrobe mistress to the stage actress Katharine Cornell, who had no children.

  For the most part, Alfred seemed unmoved by the infant’s presence, acknowledging his newborn son through journal entries such as “Blanche up much of night with the baby.” He assumed, since the couple had hired more staff, that Blanche’s load at the office would be manageable. Still, the new mother found herself going to work each day angry, tired, or depressed. She seemed unable to convey such emotions except when she’d write Alfred from a distance, while he was on a train and she at her desk. Irritating Blanche further, Sam had become a presence at the company, often suddenly appearing without notice. As the Knopf historian Amy Root Clements has remarked, Alfred’s founding a publishing house had become “a way of ‘staying home’ with his father and relishing the traits they shared … an affinity for salesmanship, a desire to be connected to affluent circles, and a taste for expensive travel, housing, dining, and tailoring.”1

  Blanche’s telegrams to Alfred were affectionate and tense by turns: the company needed her, she wanted to remind him, and her instincts said to rein in Sam, however intimidating he could be. Sam’s subordinates would remember how he shouted at them one minute and uttered platitudes the next: “Never raise your voice to a person who is dependent on you,” and “Do unto others.”2 Clifton Fadiman, later the radio host of Information, Please! and a judge at the Book-of-the-Month Club, began his literary career as the Knopfs’ stock boy, and he remembered that the brusque “Sam Knopf scared me to death.”3 Another employee said he was “aggressive and insensitive [and he] displayed little consideration for
people’s feelings.”4 As Blanche maintained, “There was no way of disagreeing without a row and probably being thrown out.”5

  Especially challenging for the young mother and publisher was the sweeping disregard with which her father-in-law treated not only her professional observations but her ideas in general. Even the birth announcements she sent out met with Sam’s disdain. Their vibrant aquamarine in place of baby blue announced the infant’s arrival along with his mother’s distinctive aesthetic and her inclination to flout convention.

  The year Pat was born, Blanche and Alfred decided to give up the spacious suburban house rented for them by Blanche’s parents. Concerned about the distance from her widowed mother, who was living in the city, and worried that she and Alfred needed to be closer to their office anyway, Blanche convinced her husband to move to Manhattan, where it was much easier for Bertha to see her grandson and the couple’s commuting expenses would be reduced. They found a great deal on the rental of the two upper floors of a converted brownstone at 44 West Ninety-Fifth Street, which was owned by Alfred’s childhood dentist, who still maintained a practice on the first floor.6

  The dentist made a generous arrangement with them, keeping the rent at seventy-five dollars a month for the six or seven years they lived there, after renovating the building so that the top floor was a combined living-dining room, perfect for entertaining, with a maid’s room and a kitchen in the rear. The master bedroom and bath were at the front of the second floor, with a room and bath for the baby and his nurse in the back.7 Friends recall that “Blanche chose everything for the house with great care,” with one longtime acquaintance, Beatrice Leval, saying that she’d “never met anyone who was as much a perfectionist and paid so much attention to detail as Blanche”—even “folding her bills going the same way in her billfold.”8

  These days, when Alfred was away, Blanche was expected for dinner at her mother’s or her brother’s on the Upper West Side, where Irving now had his own place with his wife, Irma; or even with Alfred’s family, which included Alfred’s sister, Sophie, and other in-laws. She disliked such gatherings intensely, feeling again the sensation she had as a child, of being the odd girl out due to her bookishness. Too often Blanche found herself “tongue-tied” with all the relatives, believing they had little interest in anyone’s ideas but their own. “Nothing,” she wrote Alfred after dutifully executing her family obligations, “was good” while he was on the road.9 But things were just as bad at the office, where Alfred devoted his time to Sam rather than to his wife.

  Given that Blanche’s own father had died within a year of her wedding and that Alfred was frequently gone selling books, the young woman often felt she had no one but her mother on her side. Meanwhile, she had to gather her courage and stand up to Sam. “I’m not your secretary,” she’d briskly remind him when he stopped by the office and asked her to make him coffee. “Just who do you think you are?” Sam would bellow back. After a particularly violent shouting match, Blanche ran down to the lobby to hide in the phone booth and cry, scared that upon her return the apoplectic Sam would be dead of a stroke and that Alfred would blame her.10

  A few months after Pat’s birth, in a hired car whose chauffeur drove them through the countryside, Alfred told Blanche, after several false starts, that his father wanted to “come into the business with us.” Sam Knopf, until now informally part of Knopf, hoped to expand the company and “put much money into it.”11 Arguing, the couple drove around Manhattan for two hours, and Blanche lost.

  Blanche had reminded Alfred that his father was not a publisher and that if they took his money they’d be beholden to him. But Alfred, she would later recall, was “subjugated” to his father’s will. “Had I said then, ‘I will leave you if you do this,’ he still would have gone ahead. It was my moment to have left him. But I had neither the background nor the sense to know that this was what I needed to do because from there, it was never anything but trouble and unpleasantness for me. I was working under two strong wills and would have to lose out for the rest of my life, and have. That was my last gasp.”12

  Rather than confronting the role Sam played in his wife’s unhappiness, Alfred defended to the last the father he chose to remember as always being there for him. As a child, Alfred had twisted everything he had seen and heard into evidence of Sam’s valor. In the age of psychoanalysis, the notion of a “reaction formation” neatly summed up Alfred’s defense against his father’s cruelty to Ida. Instead of admitting his rage, the boy exaggerated its opposite: he overlooked Sam’s complicity in his wife’s death, but reveled in his role of savior to his son. After all, Sam, unlike Ida, had stuck around.

  As Blanche came to understand her husband’s demons, she realized she should carefully consider whether to try for more children, as she had originally planned. She knew that the scarring from her gynecological problems, including her severe endometriosis with resultant D & Cs (dilation and curettage, a procedure to remove tissue from inside the uterus), made future pregnancies improbable, yet she preferred to think she was making the decision to have only one child. Unwilling to acknowledge her sadness at having no such choice, she made up her own account. Decades after Pat was grown, she told a friend that when she started working again, “Mr. Knopf’s stepmother [Lillian] came to see me and said to the baby, ‘When are you going to have a sister?’ I said, ‘No sister or brother for this young man. There is a war coming [in fact, the war was nearing its end] and one is enough. There are not going to be any more. And that is that.’ And there weren’t any.”13 As an adult, her son would imply that Blanche just didn’t like being a mother, possibly getting this idea from hearing how repelled she’d been by him as an infant.14

  * * *

  Three months after Pat’s birth, in September 1918, the Knopfs, hoping to sign the popular southern novelist James Branch Cabell, visited Cabell at Dumbarton Grange, his estate near Richmond, Virginia. Cabell was working on his eighth book, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, to be published in 1919, and Blanche wanted the titillating novel for Knopf. Disappointed when the couple discovered it was already committed to the respected publisher Robert McBride, Alfred later believed they had narrowly avoided a disaster when Jurgen was prosecuted for obscenity. Denounced by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice due to its immoral eponymous hero, Jurgen was about a man who took wicked trips to heaven and hell, where he dared seduce the devil’s wife. All copies of the novel were quickly seized by the vice squad and withheld until a ruling two years later, which vindicated Cabell and created exponentially higher sales for Jurgen than it would have earned otherwise. The publicity also encouraged his friends to form the whimsical “James Branch Cabell School,” which included Mencken, Van Vechten, and Elinor Wylie.

  During her initial trips to Richmond, the usually confident Blanche sometimes felt out of place; she once joked that the magnolia trees with their overpowering scent reminded her of the flowers at her wedding.

  * * *

  On October 18, 1918, a month before the war ended, Mencken finished the manuscript of The American Language, a book about the differences between America’s national language and England’s. The next year, the book would sell 1,370 of the 1,500 copies printed, and the remainder would be gone in early 1920, a superb record for a reference book. One of the young company’s proudest achievements, The American Language would be revised three times during Mencken’s lifetime and would be seen as a declaration of linguistic independence. “No more would America suffer the oppression of literary colonialism. A new day had dawned on American literature. American writers were finally able to take flight from the old tree and to trust for the first time their own dialect,” Edmund Wilson observed.15 The book’s reception pleased Blanche, who believed that only Mencken had the authority to tell Americans that their language made the United States more up-to-date than the motherland.

  Although such success buoyed her, Blanche disliked it when Alfred struck out on the road alone. She occasionally sensed “currents�
� between him and his old girlfriends, puzzling in part because he seldom wanted to have sex with her. Her daily updates on the office and her love notes suggest she was worried about his distance—both physical and psychological. On November 2, 1918, she wrote: “Honeybake, Everything has been going wrong. I tried to go to Sofie’s today and after 45 minutes in the underground found myself just where I had started—so I didn’t go … Give my love to all the boys & girls. What are you doing every minute and seeing? Honey, I’ve only had four penciled lines today [Alfred rarely wrote her]—and I’m lonesome. I want you.”16

  Only three years into their marriage, Blanche was beginning to see how difficult—and lonely—a partnership it was. Often, she sparred with her husband even as she lavished him with affection: “I went to a shop on Sixth Avenue and sold junk of mine for only $1200 which I’m promptly spending. So there are my troubles—do you see why I’m lonesome—ma honey—I love you too much—you darling. Your letters—well, you don’t say anything—what do people say to you and do?—ok for Heaven’s sake keep me close to you. My lover—and don’t love me.”17 Surely she meant to say “don’t forget”—or, even, “lose me.”

  When Blanche wasn’t busy with the office or the baby, she was buying things: “All I seem to do is spend money. Pat’s a wonder—he went to Carl’s [Van Vechten] today and to see mother. Mother Knopf went to Sofie’s. [Much] love darling—I wish you were here to hug me. Be good, and careful.” She ended with: “Woof woof.”18

  Throughout 1918, Blanche worked long hours, reading manuscripts at home or in the office, evenings and weekends included. By the end of the year, Knopf had published thirty-seven books, though none of them produced high profits, mostly due to the rise in manufacturing costs in the last year of the war. But Knopf authors were making strides. Joseph Hergesheimer was fast gaining a reputation for being the novelist of the rich and dissolute, his life increasingly imitating his art: “fantastic in dress, extravagant in conversation: more, he was brilliant.” Alfred, who shared Hergesheimer’s self-regard (along with his penchant for bright cravats), had noted humorously that the author “worked at being a conscious artist,” with his “loudly checked tweeds” and country house in West Chester, Pennsylvania. There the “local celebrity,” as if landed gentry, held court and read “Vogue, the Gazette du Bon Genre, and the Memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV.”19 Blanche put a smile on her face for the novelist, who made her squirm with what he thought were clever suggestive comments; privately, she found Hergesheimer an unbearable coxcomb, especially when she heard that he’d told James Branch Cabell the two men were the “only real artists in America.”20