As a child, Blanche Wolf wanted more than anything to live a life surrounded by books. Born in 1894, and raised in Manhattan by well-to-do parents, her love of reading and culture set her apart from her family and their upwardly-mobile, secular, and socially-constrained Jewish community. When she met Alfred Knopf in 1911, she was attracted most of all to his bookishness—which, one suspects, he might have played up in order to win over the pretty redhead, underestimating how serious she was about it. Her dream life was simple, heartbreakingly so: “We decided we would get married and make books and publish them.” How could she have known that the hardest part of that dream was the “we”?

When the house of Knopf launched in 1915, publishing was a gentleman’s pursuit—amateur, clubbish, WASP, and above all, male. Blanche and Alfred navigated this casually anti-Semitic world, holding themselves aloof from their alcoholic, philandering competitor, the “pushy Jew” Horace Liveright, founder of the Modern Library and publisher of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Over the years there would be female secretaries, copywriters, reviewers, and editors at Knopf. There would be women in charge of little magazines and the children’s-book divisions of big publishers. But there would be no other woman in the publishing industry with the status of Blanche Knopf—either in the 1920s, when she signed Langston Hughes and Willa Cather, or in the 1950s, when she celebrated Albert Camus’s Nobel prize and oversaw the translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. And despite it all, although her husband swore he’d put her name on the masthead, he never did.

THE LADY WITH THE BORZOI: BLANCHE KNOPF, LITERARY TASTEMAKER EXTRAORDINARE Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp, $30

Alfred considered Blanche “much more intuitive in her judgements” than he was, a description that condescendingly implies a woman’s touch. Easier to believe it was instinct, rather than intelligence, that allowed his wife to discern the quality of Harlem Renaissance poets and hardboiled detective fiction, of French avant-garde playwrights and political journalists alike. But he was happy enough to capitalize on the quality she brought in. From the beginning, Alfred wanted the Knopf name to be a marker of cachet; the Borzoi that became their company logo was a nod to the Russian literature on which they built their reputation. As the company treasurer Joe Lesser put it, “He wanted writers who considered Knopf superior to other houses, pure and simple.” In her biography, Laura Claridge builds a compelling case that it was Blanche, far more than Alfred, who was responsible for that superiority, who pursued and persuaded writers to sign on—often for low salaries and pitiful advances—for the sake of the firm’s reputation and for her own devoted personal attention.



Yet despite Claridge’s determination to restore Blanche to the heart of the Knopf reputation, we don’t come away from the book with a strong sense of how she made her judgements—we don’t get to see her intelligence at work, or to read her commentary on new authors or her arguments in favor of one or another. Many writers came to Knopf through unofficial scouts—including journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken, and Carl Van Vechten, photographer, novelist, and white ambassador to the Harlem Renaissance. It was Van Vechten who squired Blanche to uptown jazz clubs, introducing her to Langston Hughes, acting as confidant and gossip, and opening her eyes to the rule-breaking, wife-swapping, and race-mixing that defined “modern” culture in 1920s New York. Claridge even borrows the label “tastemaker,” bestowed on Van Vechten by his recent biographer Edward White, for Blanche. (The book’s subtitle is “Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire.”) That slogan is a sign that Claridge hasn’t quite found the story in her biography, but pieces of several: the Knopfs’ fraught marriage and Blanche’s search for affection; her pursuit of talent and nurturing of authors; Knopf’s place in the publishing landscape; the pressures on the business from money and politics; the relationship between the American and European literary worlds. Threads of all of these narratives are picked up and dropped, but never quite woven together.

For the Knopfs, marriage proved much more difficult than publishing. In Claridge’s hands Alfred Knopf takes his place in twentieth-century literature’s crowded pantheon of assholes—his great loves were the American Southwest, expensive wine, and the ritual humiliations of his friends, his family, and most of all, his wife. One after another, acquaintances and co-workers attest to a relationship that today we’d call toxic; a stew of jealousy, incompatibility, violence, and—just when it couldn’t get worse—yearning affection. Their interests diverged so completely it was almost deliberate: “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 wine.” Her taste in books was for poetry and fiction, his for history and music. Her apartment in midtown Manhattan was modern and decorated in her namesake white; he preferred the cavernous, gloomy country mansion in Purchase, in Westchester County just north of the city.