The Lady with the Borzoi!

Our book today is The Lady with the Borzoi, a biographical tribute to Blanche Knopf that somehow feels both surprising and long overdue. The book, written with grace and a cheery volubility by Laura Claridge, is the story of Blanche Knopf, the so-called “soul” of the publishing house she created a century ago with her husband Alfred, and although Claridge does a sometimes painfully thorough job of fleshing out the intense frictions that were always a well-known part of the Knopf marriage (it’s a very sympathetic effort, in the end), she’s equally adept at painting the fullest portrait ever yet made of one of the most remarkable women in the history of the publishing industry.

She took to that industry with an avid enthusiasm, and for half a century she was virtually inexhaustible in searching out new and promising authors, keeping their spirits from flagging (and, less publicly, keep their rents from going past due), and keeping the talk and champagne flowing at the famous parties she and her husband threw, which drew all of New York’s literati to the Upper East Side to talk shop and dish dirt (quieter but no less invigorating evenings were often thrown together at the Knopf summer place in scenic Falmouth, Cape Cod).

The fact that Blanche Knopf was inexhaustible in all these literary endeavors is rendered all the more striking in light of how eminently exhaustible she was, not only prone to infections and blue funks but also one of the most spectacularly clumsy women ever to don a fashionable pair of Kerrybrookes pumps. Claridge’s book gives attentive readers some hint of positively vaudevillian number of pratfalls involved, but there’s no denying the results.

Blanche Knopf discovered, debuted, encouraged, nurtured, subsidized, or otherwise helped a roster of authors that included John Hersey, William Shirer, Muriel Spark, Andre Gide, Willa Cather, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bowen, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and dozens of others. The web of her literary friendships was vast, and her sensitivity to the least plucking of that web was legendary. “Blanche knows everybody,” her friend Edna St. Vincent Millay once said. “And everyone thinks they know Blanche.”

In knowledgeable and bubbling prose (of exactly the type its subject most enjoyed), Claridge conveys the bright, tireless whirlwind of Blanche Knopf’s professional life. Let one brief snippet from 1938 stand as a good general example:

Later in the month, Blanche took off for Europe. She planned to spend several days at Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish country estate, Bowen’s Court in Kildorrey, in County Cork, where, Bowen teased her, she would be forced to unwind. Blanche and Bowen had lots to talk about, and it was surely hard for anyone to imagine Blanche relaxing, even at Bowen’s Court. Before she left port she was already busy organizing an onboard cocktail party for the evening, gathering guests that included the author and rare book collector Wilmarth Lewis; Walter Damrosch, an American conductor and composer; and Arthur Krock, a Washington journalist whom she knew slightly. She hoped to invite one of Krock’s frequent sources, Joseph P. Kennedy, as well, no doubt to suggest he write a book. But he ambassador was impossible to reach. Remembering Blanche after her death, Lewis would say that she “was very hospitable and a little overwhelming.” He remembered publishing his first book with her in 1922, Tutor’s Lane. “To become a Knopf author was already like being asked to join a club,” he said.

After her death in 1966, Jason Epstein remarked that Blanche Knopf stood for “a kind of publishing which we shall never see again.” It’s a kind of histrionic common at funerals, but there was a truth to it. The Knopf publishing “brand” was always distinctive, a connotation of care and excellence largely willed into being by Blanche Knopf (Claridge is too kind to say outright that Alfred Knopf was the far more ploddingly conventional of the two, but it was nevertheless true). And that brand came under direct fire when the publishing industry as a whole began to be gobbled up by the giant German multinational conglomerate Bertelsmann back in the 1990s. A small publisher in the early 21st century might possibly emulate the smarts, spirit, and discrimination that Knopf showed in the early 20th, but no large publisher any longer can strike the kinds of idiosyncratic and author-encouraging deals that were Blanche Knopf’s lifeblood. In fact, here’s hoping The Lady with the Borzoi earns out for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.