It is a rare book that features appearances by Albert Camus, Willa Cather, and H. L. Mencken, but—alas—an even rarer book that squanders such a captivating cast of characters. The work of the aforementioned authors, along with that of dozens of others, was released by the husband-and-wife publishers Alfred A. and Blanche Knopf, the latter of whom is the subject of this admiring and exhaustive biography. Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, the books Mr. and Mrs. Knopf ushered into print are of considerably greater interest than their own story of literary entrepreneurship and marital strife.
To be sure, Laura Claridge approaches this material with a definite perspective. Although the firm the couple set up in 1915 was named just for Alfred, Claridge—the author of biographies of Emily Post and Norman Rockwell—persuasively advances the argument that it was she, not he, who was the brains behind the operation. And in an introduction, Claridge wastes little time in establishing Blanche’s bona fides. The publisher “nurtured and often edited” the handiwork of such notables as Clarence Day and Muriel Spark, among others, and her acquisitions were not limited to literary fiction but also included such heterogeneous categories as crime fiction (Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald), serious-minded nonfiction (John Hersey’s Hiroshima), and foreign-language works translated into English (Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex).
Perhaps Arnold Rampersad said it most succinctly:
Blanche may well have been on the short end of the stick when it came to her partnership with Alfred. For example, Claridge writes that Blanche’s stake in the company was a mere 25 percent, despite earlier assurances from Alfred that the two would be “equal partners,” and her involvement was consistently downplayed. On the other hand, Blanche was the beneficiary of a publishing industry that, at the time she entered it, did not value credentials above all else, allowing her to flourish despite lacking a college diploma. Born in 1894 in New York, the daughter of Julius and Bertha (Samuels) Wolf received no education beyond the Gardner School—which, as described here, possibly provided a surer grounding in Western literature than many college campuses.
In Claridge’s insightful telling, it was while studying at the “enchanted universe” of Gardner that the bookish Blanche blossomed. The six-story structure, Claridge writes, included a “winding white marble staircase that led to an endless array of grand bookcases,” which were stocked with the collected works of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert, among others. The stage was set for a career in which Blanche became a perceptive judge of talent with a ken for the cutting-edge.
She carried her single-minded devotion to a literary life into her romance with Alfred, whom she married in 1916. “We never talked anything,” she remembered, “but books and music, music and books.” Being mad about the arts, of course, is a poor substitute for love: “At the beginning of the marriage, in the house in Westchester before Pat was born,” said friend Elsie Alsberg, referring to their son, Alfred A. (Pat) Knopf Jr., “I sensed the marriage was not too good.” There were aesthetic disagreements as well. As early as 1913, the two had opposite reactions to the famous International Exhibition of Modern Art at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York. To Blanche, the show’s examples of “Fauvism, Futurism, and Cubism” were intriguing, while to Alfred, such art was “lightweight.”
As usual, Blanche was prescient, but that did not quell Alfred’s condescension. Later, she lobbied to acquire Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park, but was overruled. Board meetings at Knopf would feature rancorous exchanges between the marrieds. “Sometimes going too far when nothing seemed to blunt her husband’s rudeness, she deliberately nettled him,” Claridge writes. “She’d turn to the man on her left, then her right, speaking softly until Alfred shouted at her to be quiet.”
The highs and lows of Alfred and Blanche’s personal and professional union hold our attention to a point, as do the specifics of the business of book-making that are sprinkled throughout. We learn, for example, of the canny choice to set Knopf’s debut publication—an English translation of Emile Augier’s Four Plays—in Cheltenham, a font which had already been “adopted as a headline typeface by the New York Times.” And we learn of Blanche’s early decision to use so-called stained tops, in which color is added to the tops of pages; the elegant practice will be familiar to any reader of the collected works of John Updike (a Knopf author until his death in 2009).
In the end, however, this biography does feature a fatal flaw: The many classic books referenced as having been acquired and published by the Knopfs are invariably more enticing than a life of the Knopfs. The saga of Alfred and Blanche simply cannot compete with Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit or Leslie Marchand’s Byron: A Biography or The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster. At one point, Claridge strains to establish a connection between W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions—which the firm reissued in 1916—and Blanche herself, writing that her fingernails resembled “the talons of the book’s dying heroine” in her malnourished later years. Yet this only serves as a reminder that Blanche did not write, nor is she the subject of, Green Mansions; she was “only” involved in making the book available to the public. To put it another way, a biography of a publisher is akin to a biography of a movie producer or a frame-maker. Each profession comes into contact with creative work, but none is primarily responsible for it.
This is true in spite of the fact that Blanche (who died in 1966) comes across as a charming and sympathetic individual, admirably gallant when she pretended not to hear her husband’s put-down of her “haggard” appearance following a medical procedure (“Do you recognize yourself now, Mrs. Knopf?”) and, for all her cerebral qualities, appealingly concerned with appearances, as when she relayed instructions to Christian Dior for a dress to be worn at the Nobel Prize ceremony honoring Albert Camus (“You have my measurements, can’t spend too much but it must be elegant”).
Peter Tonguette is the editor, most recently, of Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews.
