The Lady with the Borzoi Read online

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  In 1923, when Publishers Weekly began tracking such figures, Knopf would release one hundred titles. Additional statistics for the same year showed 150 publishers averaging 39.27 titles (including textbooks and manuals) per house. In 1930 the average was nearly the same, at 40.69 titles a year, a number that would drop during the Depression, though not dramatically. Books, it seemed, were a commodity readers would find a way to afford, and publishing in those days appeared robust.12 However briefly, the period fed a diet of optimism to English-language authors, especially those eager to be published in the United States. Carl Van Vechten would recall how “no one born after World War I could have any faint concept of the epoch during which so much writing blossomed,” both at home and abroad.13

  He was speaking of a group each of whom in some respect had confronted a world war—now more than a few preternaturally aware of life’s end—including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, alongside Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, Elinor Wylie, W. Somerset Maugham, and Hergesheimer and Mencken. Some would be forgotten within a few decades, but for now, often connected in part through their various gatherings at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel, the writers thrived on the vibrancy they lent one another. It was as if the intellectual acuity of the Round Table—Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Harold Ross, and at least one woman, Dorothy Parker—sharpened all those who encountered it.14 Parker, for instance, challenged to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence, produced the memorable line “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.” Blanche thought that wonderful, wishing she herself had the wit (and confidence) to shoot off such one-liners.15

  The publisher made sure that her social calendar always accommodated Van Vechten’s Algonquin parties. Anytime his brother, Ralph, was in town, the Algonquin became the center of Midtown’s attention. One time the brothers hosted a “very wet party” in Ralph’s hotel rooms, the throng of guests threatening to burst into the hallway. With a young actress perched on his knee, Mencken fell asleep, letting the girl slide to the floor while he “snored loudly enough to rouse the guests in the neighboring suite.” Awakening, he was astonished at the entirely new set of guests, including Tallulah Bankhead. Total strangers wafted in and out of conversations that Blanche, staying most of the night, soaked up: talk about sex, Freud, Prohibition, “kissing parrots,” and more outlandish topics the later it got. This was now her territory, one she relished having to herself, her husband wanting no part of it.16

  Not all was revelry. From entries in Alfred’s diary, its binding studded with diamonds, by late August the Knopfs were disappointed in the sales for Java Head, which, expected by now to be earning well, was grossing only 25 percent of their earlier projections. Hergesheimer remained in good spirits, though Joe Lesser had already alerted the publishers to trouble selling the author’s next novel, Cytherea, to the movies, as they’d hoped—not due to nonexistent censorship issues, they gently disabused their disappointed author, but because of the rapid decline of Java Head sales.17 At least others on the Knopf list were selling well: Van Vechten’s books were doing better in Philly these days than Hergesheimer’s, even though Joe was a native. Later that week at lunch with Carl, Alfred estimated sales of twenty-five thousand for The Blind Bow-Boy, Van Vechten’s novel about a boy who, when grown, is summoned to New York by his wealthy father and given an education in life. Critics considered it a latter-day Great Expectations, but even the self-assured Van Vechten thought that comparison overblown.

  In fact, the image in The Blind Bow-Boy of “absinth served in goblets” came to Van Vechten at a Knopf dinner party, a few of whose guests were thereafter used as models for his novel’s key female characters. A kind, liberal socialite shouts “with laughter” when her beautiful mother announces that she’s about to marry “a Jew.” Amused, the upper-crust woman declares that you “will not be received,” then continues on, merrily, with other matters.18 A bestseller, the novel, which Sinclair Lewis delightedly called “impertinent, subversive,” tracks a young man’s education in the Seven Lively Arts and Seven Deadly Sins. With its snake charmer from Coney Island and its musician named Bunny, it was a mix of the fantastic and the real, including a character based on the fabulously wealthy and now openly bisexual Mabel Dodge Luhan, who in life married an “Indian,” a Native American, who wooed her with a drum and a teepee.

  Wagering that the novel would sell, the Knopfs used the first-rate Vail-Ballou Press in Binghamton, New York, as typesetter for their exacting friend, and esparto (strong fiber) paper manufactured in Scotland and furnished locally by W. F. Etherington and Co., New York. These details of bookmaking, which followed a note describing “the type in which the book is set” as Caslon, wowed not only Knopf’s readers but other publishers as well. Their artisanal attention pleased Van Vechten, who in turn vowed to send more strong authors Knopf’s way. Earlier, at Blanche’s behest, Carl had convinced Wallace Stevens to sign with her. Now, in 1923, along with The Blind Bow-Boy, Knopf published Stevens’s first book of poetry, Harmonium, which some critics believe to be the second most important volume of twentieth-century American verse, after The Waste Land.19 Of the original edition of fifteen hundred, only a hundred copies of Harmonium were sold, with Filene’s in Boston selling their remaindered books for eleven cents each the following December. Often you had to wait a long time for a book to emerge as a classic, something Blanche understood. Spotting talent before the public was ready for it was part of her job.

  The year 1923 proved providential in many respects. Upon her first New York City recital a year earlier, the London concert pianist Myra Hess had been provided with an introduction to the Knopfs by Ada Galsworthy. Now the raucous young musician, after hitting it off with Blanche at their first meeting, had become her good friend.20 Myra loved to sing “The Rosary” a half tone flat at subsequent dinners with the Knopfs, exactly the kind of mischief Blanche enjoyed, though she rarely showed this side of herself before people who might criticize her.21 Myra’s friendship would prove rich and easy to maintain, particularly since the Knopfs had decided to open a London office: they, especially Alfred, wanted to create a greater presence in the English-speaking countries and, at least as important, to ensure they’d be among the first to bid on Britain’s books as soon as they were to be signed to American publishers.

  The new office would have to wait, however, while Blanche submitted to the hysterectomy she’d long been delaying. Young for such a procedure, she had been fighting gynecological problems since Pat’s birth. Alfred and Pat both told Peter Prescott that she had strongly wanted to get pregnant again, which her five-year postponement of the surgery supports. Too frail to go to her friend George Gershwin’s recital in New York, she did manage to attend when it was repeated in Boston. After the performance, Gershwin took her aside to share his news: Paul Whiteman, a noted American bandleader and orchestral director, had commissioned him to write a special composition for a program to be held in six weeks. Whiteman wanted to try a concerto for piano with jazz band, Gershwin said, in what was probably his first allusion to Rhapsody in Blue.

  But the end of 1923 would involve Gershwin in more than his music, the chaos of the era and his personal life powering his energetic composition on the horizon. He and Edwin Knopf retreated to the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, in order for the musician to finish the symphony he had begun.22 Their visit would be memorable enough in its solitude for Gershwin to consider briefly, thirteen years later, casting Fred Astaire in a film based on the hotel’s “enforced sepulchal silence … with its squeakless guests.”23 A few days after the men returned to Manhattan, Gershwin let it slip that the actress Mary Ellis, Edwin’s bride of one year, had been sleeping with him before Edwin’s wedding and was doing so still. After a few weeks of intrigue and turmoil that January—the extended Knopf family offering advice, and Gershwin attending dinner at Blanche’s as
usual—“Eddie” and Mary Ellis settled down, though everyone gossiped about how she was mad about Gershwin (who, it turned out, was in love with Pauline Heifetz, the already famous violinist’s sister). Gershwin, though not yet Jascha Heifetz, was usually present at Blanche’s typically intimate parties (due in part to their house being of modest size but large enough for the always perfectly tuned piano), where the slightly cocky young composer developed a characteristic stance of holding a fat cigar between the second and third fingers of his right hand while he tickled the piano keys.24 One night Stravinsky attended, sitting stony-faced throughout Gershwin’s performance, and Paul Robeson continued to show up, occasionally singing with the younger Broadway tenor Taylor Gordon. At some parties, Gershwin, eager for feedback, started playing at 9:00 p.m. and didn’t stop until 3:00 a.m., grateful that such casual evenings allowed him to rehearse his compositions.

  Finally, in Midtown Manhattan, on the afternoon of February 12, 1924, across from Bryant Park at the 1,100-seat Aeolian Hall, Gershwin presented Rhapsody in Blue in front of a sold-out audience. After listening to a seemingly endless program performed by the Palais Royal Orchestra, the audience, which included Rachmaninoff, Heifetz, Leopold Stokowski, Victor Herbert, Walter Damrosch, Heywood Broun, Fannie Hurst and her lover, the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Mencken, and Van Vechten, started to exit. Then Gershwin, the twenty-second and penultimate performer on the program, dashed to the piano. Whiteman, the conductor, signaled for what would become the single most famous clarinet glissando ever played, his baton lingering in the air even as Gershwin began his downbeat. At the conclusion of Rhapsody in Blue, there was a near stampede to congratulate its composer on what would be a defining moment of the Jazz Age.

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  Provoked in part by the clear signs that the age was only getting grander, nine years after Knopf opened its doors Sam decreed that Blanche and Alfred and their current staff of forty employees leave the Candler for Midtown’s Heckscher Building (today the Crown Building). Designed by Warren and Wetmore, the firm that built Grand Central Terminal (and Aeolian Hall), the building at 730 Fifth Avenue was one of the most prestigious sites in Manhattan. The expensive quarters were nonetheless configured so that Blanche and Alfred would share an enormous office, an arrangement she found impossible. “The old man,” however, had huge, imposing quarters to himself, and “he pounded the table at meetings and made a noise and wanted everything done his way.”25 Sam subsidized their mahogany-paneled five-thousand-square-foot office and, more important, maintained his contacts with the advertising and banking firms who’d employed him years before.

  The Heckscher offices positioned Knopf at the center of activity, announcing the company’s modernity. The building was the first affected by the new zoning law, whereby at required intervals, skyscrapers had to be “set back” in layers from the street, the structure allowing light among the juggernauts that otherwise blocked the sun. Blanche thought the Heckscher’s resultant series of cantilevered boxes boring, except for the golden ornament on top, and she believed that paying for space in the $25 million building absurd.

  The family tensions were as hard on her as her slow surgical recovery, which caused her to turn down Van Vechten’s invitation to accompany him to Richmond in the early spring of 1924. She was also preoccupied with launching what she considered Carl’s best novel, The Tattooed Countess, to be released in June. In many ways, as Sinclair Lewis wrote, his own Main Street as well as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! influenced The Tattooed Countess, while Van Vechten, “often compared to Mr. Aldous Huxley … has gone beyond Huxley.”26 An aging and widowed countess, a midwestern girl who had married European money, returns to her provincial community and takes as a lover an adolescent boy (thought by Van Vechten’s sister Emma to be based on Carl), and the two flee to Paris.

  Gertrude Stein told Van Vechten, enigmatically, that “after having been tender to everyone else you are now tender to yourself.” Scott Fitzgerald wrote from Europe that the view of Iowa was “unbeatable,” and Knopf’s poet Elinor Wylie called it a “cruel little masterpiece of analysis.” Many readers found the novel lacking. The critic Joseph Wood Krutch lamented in his review for The Nation that the characters “had no gift of life,” while the Literary Review and The New York Times deemed it “easy reading” and light entertainment, respectively.27 In any event, sales of The Tattooed Countess, along with his income from his first two novels, allowed Carl to move to a choicer location, a spacious double apartment at 150 West Fifty-Fifth, leaving behind 151 East Nineteenth Street—and, to his dismay, his neighbors, Theda Bara, George Bellows, and (the sporadically present) Elinor Wylie among them.28

  During the novel’s release Blanche missed what turned out to be a “perfectly riotous dinner party at the Cabells.” Still, Van Vechten promised Blanche that he would share all the best gossip, which inevitably came from Wylie (an honorary southerner, since she had spent her adolescence in Washington, D.C.), Ellen Glasgow, and Emily Clark, who gave “dinner parties galore.”29 Blanche’s earlier assumptions about Virginia had hinged on images of slavery as well as critical remarks that the Baltimorean Mencken had made about “his people,” and she now realized that she had taken Mencken too seriously.

  She possessed, it seems, a genuine feel for equality, extending even to her friends’ children, who, when they accompanied their mothers for lunch with Blanche, were often confused by the serious questions she asked them.30 The young weren’t used to such frank interest. Respect and a sense of social justice were important to the publisher, perhaps due to her early awareness that the “right kind” of Jew had pale skin, an illogical formula that left her cold. She had fought with her mother when Bertha declared the dark-skinned family Blanche was marrying into inferior to the lighter Ashkenazi Jews. The publicist Harding “Pete” Lemay, well into his nineties, still remembers Blanche sorrowfully recounting to him that before he arrived at Knopf in 1958, when Blanche felt backed against the wall by her husband, she’d haughtily repeat something that supported her mother’s silly position of racial superiority based on skin shade.31

  Exhausted by the recent office relocation, a few months later Blanche was forced into another move as well, this one personal, also dictated by her father-in-law. Upon Sam’s insistence that they “have a residence worthy of their company,” she and Alfred moved from their two-floor rental at the dentist’s house on West Ninety-Fifth Street to a new, modernist two-bedroom apartment at 1148 Fifth Avenue, where they would live for the next four years. Overlooking Central Park on the Upper East Side, their third-floor apartment was filled with light. It was a “long, long apartment,” Pat would recall as an adult, with a “huge, grand room.” Running the full length of the corridor with bookcases on either side, “as you turned to your left, my mother’s room … [had a door] that led into a twin-bedded room that my father and I shared.”32 Blanche had been just fine at West Ninety-Fifth Street, which she knew the “old man” found too humble, thereby compelling his son to “move into much more elegant quarters.”33 Clearly Blanche’s disgust wasn’t over aesthetic issues, but over her father-in-law’s unremitting control and Alfred’s unfailing acquiescence.

  Blanche brooded that Alfred’s family had too much control of Pat as well, who was “frightfully spoiled by his grandparents and not by me.”34 She worried about Alfred’s nastiness to their son, and about Pat observing his father’s nastiness to her. By the end of the summer of 1924, she had resolved to put the boy out of harm’s way by enrolling him in Columbia Grammar School at 5 West Ninety-Third Street on the Upper West Side, a full-time program preventing her child from spending much time with Sam and Lillie—or Alfred. The following year, Pat would attend the Riverdale School for Boys in the Bronx, which five years earlier had begun to take in boarding students. Alfred was attracted to its strong athletics, and Blanche to a riding program that she wanted for her son.

  In her late-life personal notes, Blanche wrote that “ti
me went on until it all became impossible and Mr. Knopf wanted to move back to the country which he had always cared more about than anything else. I warned him if he did I would not go with him as the business of working in an office all day long and taking a train to the country was physically impossible.”35 Perhaps in retaliation, Alfred made his father an official part of the company.

  During the year that Sam Knopf was voted a board member and shareholder, Blanche believed that he had “little money but gave the impression of being a millionaire.” Somehow he put money into Knopf and brought in outside interests, so that in 1924 Knopf was incorporated. “From then on our troubles began and from then on I started to run away,” Blanche said.36

  She felt herself constantly criticized by “the old man,” the “unremitting stress” leading to an affair with a Frenchman sustained over three years.37 It is possible, given the distance from which Blanche told this story and her penchant for combining facts, that her Frenchman was Hubert Hohe, a lover not to come into her life for another fifteen years.

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  During this period, the thirty-year-old Blanche came up with ever-shrewder ways to have a real sex life. Their stronger income allowing her to throw lavish parties for her favorite musicians, she appreciated the ability to have an occasional (and sometimes long-lasting) liaison with whichever famous conductor or instrumentalist was in town, or even nearby, in Philadelphia or Boston. These men exuded the passion she felt penned up inside her, along with the music she had grown to love, even as she listened with her eyes shut. Leopold Stokowski, Jascha Heifetz, and Benno Moiseiwitsch would all become regular lovers, but it was the Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky who would have the strongest hold on Blanche. In 1924 Koussevitzky was beginning what would be a twenty-five-year tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and from the start, Blanche would sponsor a celebration for him after the BSO’s first New York concert of each season. As one admirer commented about “Koussie,” as his friends called him, “His sartorial splendor, his beautiful carriage, his reserved but dramatic gestures on the podium, all of these endeared him immediately to the … ladies.”38