The Lady with the Borzoi Page 8

  Soon after the novel’s publication, Gertrude Stein, Hergesheimer, and Cabell, as well as the arts entrepreneur Mabel Dodge (portrayed as the character Edith Dale in Peter Whiffle), sent Carl their praise. By August the novel had sold more than 5,700 copies, a respectable number for fiction. The designers had created ninety-seven variations of batik papers to appear on the endpapers, but after Peter Whiffle went through eight printings this first year, it was consigned to plain cloth bindings: the fancy versions were no longer needed to attract an audience.

  Blanche still hoped, however, to secure a first-rate designer for several other novels. According to his memoirs, Alfred noted that during the previous year the Knopfs had “become acquainted with the splendid artist George Bellows. I was laboring under the delusion that we could get, and could afford to pay … a really first-rate man for some of our fiction.” He first took the well-respected illustrator C. B. Falls, and then Bellows, to lunch. In any case, Alfred remembered, “George, his wife Emma, Blanche and I” became very close friends, “and we used to exchange meals, our going to the house on East 18th Street and the Bellows coming to us at West 95th. It wasn’t long before I became a great admirer of his lithographs, so many of which are absolutely perfectly American. We had precious little money,” but somehow Alfred arranged a deal with Bellows to do his father’s portrait, though the artist never did a book jacket for Knopf.37 To no avail, Blanche protested their commissioning the painting. She at least got a new friendship out of it, enjoying for years to come the Bellowses themselves.

  * * *

  On New Year’s Eve, as 1922 came to a close, a firecracker detonated just as Edwin Knopf, Alfred’s younger half brother, reached for it. After several days in the hospital, Edwin was forced to have his right hand amputated. Sam Knopf was distraught, and kept “weeping to the point where his desk blotter was wet,” though he told Ned, as Sam called him, that he would simply have to make do with one hand.38 The story would be embroidered over the years, until Edwin had saved a child by falling on a live grenade.39 Fortunately, Edwin was left-handed. Blanche mentioned the accident in a brief letter to Mencken, but she had to shift gears rapidly, helping Alfred prepare for a trip to Chicago in a few days. He would solicit large orders from the ever-faithful Marshall Field’s and from Carson Pirie Scott & Co., a department store, he’d told her more than once, whose building was designed by Louis Sullivan (with a later addition by Daniel Burnham). Blanche felt she needed to talk with Mencken before then, so that he could help her decide which of her books Alfred should push.

  In 1922 and ’23, it seemed at times that their business, their child, and the couple’s mutual friends, Mencken and Van Vechten, were what held the Knopfs together: there appeared little personal bond between them. During this period, their young son became a bed wetter, his soaked linens usually discovered by the housekeeper after his parents had left for work. When Alfred was informed of the mishap on his return home, he would hit Pat with a belt or razor strap. Once, the desperate boy placed his wet bedding on the floor and tried to dry it with an iron, thereby burning holes in the sheet, carpet, and floor.40

  Alfred would also strike Pat if the boy failed to eat everything on his plate. “I always feared my father,” the adult son recalled almost nostalgically, his fear converted into admiration. Only when Pat got his pilot wings in World War II would he stop being afraid of Alfred and bask in his praise, having become the war hero Alfred had never been.41

  When, after his father’s death, Pat was asked by the writer Peter Prescott about rumors that Blanche had been struck, too, Pat replied that “Alfred beat her from the beginning.” He also told William Koshland, eventual president of Knopf, that Alfred pummeled his mother, claiming that he could “remember his mother yelling because his father was beating her up.”42 Given Pat’s complicated personality, it is hard to know what to trust. According to Frances Lindley, Blanche’s friend and a Knopf editor until she became a publicist and later an editor at Harper & Row, Pat was a very loud, crude person. “He’s not as insensitive [sic] as he makes himself sound. He’s very vehement; Pat’s capacity for self-awareness is as limited as his father’s. He always overacted antagonism to his mother.”43 The boy usually ran out of the room when the adults fought. “[My father] had the makings of a violent man,” he asserted.44 Later, Pat asked Prescott to strike his comments from the record.

  According to the sociologist Stephanie Coontz, an upper-class man physically abusing his family in the early part of the twentieth century wasn’t unheard-of, but it was nonetheless considered a disgrace, something to be hidden from public view.45 Blanche surely felt the shame of the battered wife, the sense that she had done something wrong, along with a growing rage she worked hard to suppress.

  She tried to develop interests in common with her husband, outside of work, if only to present a unified front to Pat. But everywhere she zigged, he zagged: she liked the East, he the West; she light meals, he stick-to-your-ribs food; she spirits, he fine wines. They recognized that their literary interests remained distinct as well: Blanche sought fiction, poetry, and nonfiction adventure, while Alfred still valued world histories and books on classical music. They had in common one enthusiasm: a passion for dogs. Even though it was a rushed spring in 1923, with both publishers leaving for London by mid-March before heading for Berlin, Alfred suddenly seemed preoccupied with buying a dog. Blanche at least understood his eagerness, one of the infrequent moments they agreed on anything these days: dogs loved you unconditionally.46 As Emily Dickinson had written, “Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.”47

  5

  WILD SUCCESS

  BEFORE THEY LEFT FOR EUROPE, the couple visited a country kennel owned by a well-respected breeder of a rare British bloodhound. The friendly, calm animal so impressed them that they crossed the Atlantic Ocean discussing the pros and cons of a purchase. Finally deciding the hound cost too much, they reluctantly wired the breeder, “Not now.”1 When Alfred won money gambling on the way home, however, they immediately cabled that they had changed their minds.

  Blanche loved the hound, which was exceptionally large yet “extremely gentle and very shy.” The breed’s reputation for “ferocity” was ill-deserved, she decided.2 Photographs show her sitting with a dog almost as big as herself lolling half in her lap. Marlow, named after Conrad’s narrator Charles Marlow, was the nervous sort, once so afraid of the racket he made by kicking over a few milk bottles that he ran off and hid for several days. The hound slept in Blanche and Alfred’s bedroom, sighing loudly as he fell asleep at night, a sound Blanche found soothing. Nonetheless, she worried that he was confined, the large dog getting too little exercise. After spending time in Port Washington with the Daniel Guggenheims, and returning home at the end of the summer, Blanche and Alfred decided to board Marlow during the week in Westchester County, where he’d have more room to run. They’d take him home on weekends to Ninety-Fifth Street, which had a backyard. But Marlow developed distemper, and within a few days of his first trip home, the dog was dead.

  His replacement was paid for by the seller, but this did little to comfort Blanche, who had already become deeply attached to Marlow and worried that somehow they were to blame for his death. Nor was she reassured by the traits the new bloodhound exhibited when he was delivered to the office. Far from friendly, as the breeder had assured them he was, the growling dog gnawed the furniture, causing Alfred to run across the street to buy him food. Too rambunctious for the Knopfs’ needs, Marlow II was put up for sale, Blanche commenting that “Marlow” seemed an accursed name for their dogs.

  Just before selling Marlow II, however, Blanche and Alfred entered him in a large competition on private grounds in Mount Kisco, New York, where he was the only English bloodhound to show and therefore was awarded the blue ribbon. Not surprisingly, the Knopfs were motivated to take the bloodhound to more dog shows, where he inevitably won first place by default.

  Hoping to tame Marlow further and find
a way to keep him in spite of his weaknesses, the couple bought him a companion, a scruffy young Irish terrier, a “gay rascal” who loved to annoy “the huge boy.” When the hound fell asleep on the sofa, Alfred wrote in his memoirs, the “little one exercised himself enormously, trying to make sexual contact but never coming within twelve inches of touching the big dog.”3 Reluctantly, they sold Marlow II and for the immediate future stayed with the terrier, who required little outdoor exercise.

  For some months the couple’s usual battles stayed at bay. Their decisions on which writers to add to the Knopf roster were in sync, and Blanche especially appreciated the way Mencken and Van Vechten played to the Knopfs’ individual strengths, acting as unpaid, informal scouts, ensuring both Blanche’s and Alfred’s loyalty. Poets and novelists who came to the company through such links inevitably led to further connections. In this way, the publishers had included chapbooks by Kahlil Gibran on their early lists, the poet brought to them by Witter Bynner—who had in turn been delivered to them by Carl. So far sales of Gibran’s few books had been disappointing, but Blanche insisted that they keep the writer on their list: she had a hunch about him. The Prophet proved her right.

  At 51 West Tenth Street, where he lived from 1911 till his death in 1931, the “moony Lebanese mystic” wrote his long prose poem, over the years to be translated into forty languages.4 In print since its publication in 1923, The Prophet was written in Arabic and then translated into English—and it proved a major moneymaker for Knopf throughout the company’s history. (Johnny Cash even recorded a spoken-word version of the book in 1996.) Though they reveled in The Prophet’s success, the publishers were bewildered by the book’s popularity. They finally decided that the story’s simplicity, despite its supposed intricacy, made readers, especially young adults, feel intelligent. And there was the ever-popular theme of a journey of self-discovery.

  Almustafa, a prophet and the story’s protagonist, boards a ship that will carry him home after twelve years in a foreign city. Beseeched by fellow travelers, he discusses subjects encompassing the human condition, the narrative forming a kind of gentle Canterbury Tales, divided into chapters whose subjects range from joy and sadness to talking and drinking—with life and death undergirding everything. Typical of the poem is “On Love”:

  When love beckons to you follow him,

  Though his ways are hard and steep.

  And when his wings enfold you yield to him,

  Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

  And when he speaks to you believe in him,

  Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

  For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.5

  A few years too late for Blanche, in 1968 John Lennon used a line (with a slight alteration) from Gibran’s 1926 collection of parables and aphorisms, Sand and Foam, in the Beatles’ song “Julia,” on The White Album: “Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you.” In its first year of publication, forty-five years before the book had become “cool,” Knopf sold 1,159 copies (of an ambitious first printing of 2,000). Demand for The Prophet doubled the following year—and doubled again the year after that. From the mid-twenties, annual sales rose almost exponentially throughout Blanche’s life: 12,000 in 1935, to 111,000 in 1961, to 240,000 in 1965. One of the country’s bestsellers of the twentieth century, The Prophet still sells more than 5,000 copies a week in the early twenty-first century.6

  From his various journal accounts of their work as well as public references, it seems as if Alfred never mentioned Blanche’s wisdom in holding on to the poet (who died of cirrhosis and tuberculosis at age forty-eight). He did point out, however, that Knopf hadn’t spent more than a few thousand dollars advertising what he considered a screed. In his 1980 book In Quest of Music, Irving Kolodin, the Saturday Review music critic, wrote that he clearly remembered the place Kahlil Gibran held “in the life and fortunes of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.”7 A majority of the 150 books on music that Knopf eventually published would be subsidized by The Prophet (and later by Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking).

  Gaining confidence in her professional decisions, seeking reassurances from Mencken and Van Vechten far less frequently, Blanche breathed easier. Her professional life had fallen into a complex rhythm that felt right, and Blanche relished the range of demands her job entailed—even her interactions with her husband, when he was civil. Unlike the heads of today’s major houses, the Knopfs, in Alfred’s office, met with everyone, roughly ten people each morning. Alfred was in charge of beginning and ending the meetings, and he did most of the talking as well. At 10:00 a.m., Blanche, Alfred, and their accountant, Joe Lesser, saw the manufacturing and sales staff and the senior editors, two or three by now, who were expected to report any problems and be gone by 10:15. Then the executive committee convened. On Tuesdays, again with the Knopfs present, a group of five or so assembled in the library to discuss book jackets, and on Wednesdays, an editorial meeting with three or four in attendance lasted less than twenty minutes.

  Often Blanche went to Elizabeth Arden afterward to get her hair and nails done, preparing for her evening work: acting the socialite, attending endless parties and musical events on the arms of friends, making sure she was seen while she herself was always on the lookout for a book idea that could come from anywhere or anyone. Her husband usually preferred staying at home and hooking up with his private bootlegger, afterward drinking alone. At least Alfred’s devotion to the best in anything culinary kept Blanche’s parties supplied with first-rate liquor, unlike New York’s less fortunate. The common folk generally stuck with two drinks: gin and lemon, which tasted like sulfuric acid, or a martini so dry it seemed like a “concentrated solution of quinine.” Both tasted so bad that they were regarded “as purely medicinal and swallowed at one gulp.” On the rare occasions when she accepted either, the drink made Blanche gag.8

  Paradoxically, Prohibition ensured that fashionable urbanites would drink more than ever, misbehaving flagrantly in the process, though Blanche wasn’t as wild as her friends, if only because of the manuscripts she had to read in the morning. Sometimes she’d give in to the chance to go out for a taste of the wild life that was the buzz of the day. Carl, especially, repeated outrageous stories, causing Blanche to join his party crowd more often than she should. At dinner, for instance, in the apartment of the actress Carlotta Monterey and the popular New Yorker cartoonist Ralph Barton, Van Vechten had listened for three hours to the couple’s debate over whether or not they should continue to live together. Upon their inconclusive finish, they ripped off their clothes and gave “a remarkable performance. Ralph goes down on Carlotta. She masturbates and expires in ecstasy. They do 69, etc.,” after which Carlo, bored, “finally left.”9 Blanche tried to listen as if nothing fazed her, but she was aghast and her friend knew he had impressed her.

  Though her attire in the office was impeccable, Blanche undeniably had become showier in the jewelry and makeup she wore, even at work. She connected with Knopf’s women novelists—and many of the men—far more naturally than Alfred did, if only because she seemed to dress up for everyone, thus flattering them all. This was the year Willa Cather confirmed her hunch that Knopf was the right place for her, in large part because she bonded with Blanche, who knew enough to tone down her appearance when the stolid writer came to visit and to let Cather take the lead as they talked.

  As promised, the Knopfs energetically advertised her novel One of Ours, a slow but deliberately paced story about a desolate young man lonely on his parents’ Nebraska farm, then finally finding himself through the battles of World War I far from home. Its near glorification of war’s potential to bestow purpose earned some negative reviews, but sales kept climbing. Cather had hoped for ten thousand advance orders for One of Ours; instead, Knopf’s aggressive marketing led to twelve thousand early sales. They initi
ally printed fifteen thousand copies, but immediately ordered another ten thousand to meet demand.

  When One of Ours earned Cather the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, the unimpressive sales of My Ántonia soared, as did those of all of the author’s previously published books. The Knopfs had signed Cather at just the right moment.

  Cather remained a favorite of the house for decades—as much, Blanche would only half joke, for requiring no advance as for her novels. Blanche invited her to the Knopfs’ dinners when Gershwin was playing, and Cather remained grateful to the couple until her death in 1947, especially to Blanche, for whom she would autograph one of her author photos: “For you, with love, dear Blanche, Willa Cather.” Her inscription to Alfred was less affectionate: “For Alfred Knopf from Willa Cather.”10 Many decades later, Phyllis Robinson, Cather’s biographer, would conclude that those who wanted to stay important to the writer had to realize the “fond attention that was so necessary to her.”11 Blanche’s authors responded not only to her magnanimity, but also to an attractive vulnerability she often hid, announcing as it did her wish to be liked.