If you’ve ever struggled with the task of composing a guest list for the ultimate fantasy dinner party, Laura Claridge’s biography of Blanche Knopf (née Wolf) will show you whom to put at the head of your table. That dream guest is, of course, Claridge’s subject: the petite, intense and, as Robert Gottlieb once put it, 'fierce and exigent' co-founder of the great literary publishing house Alfred A. Knopf.
Claridge handles the theme of a woman’s struggle for power and recognition with aplomb...[but] the incessant Blanche/Alfred shoving match – the 'couple’s peace was always frangible,' writes Claridge, sounding a new depth in understatement – soon wears thin.
The story is sad and fascinating—so fascinating that one wishes Claridge were a more careful writer. Her prose is clunky and a little tone-deaf, starting with that title, which is both overwrought (isn’t it enough to be a tastemaker, without also being 'extraordinaire'?) and a little misleading. It’s true that using a borzoi as the trademark was Blanche’s idea, but that was before she owned a pair of them. After a brief exposure, she declared that borzois were 'cowardly, stupid, disloyal, and full of self-pity' and switched to Yorkshire terriers. The biography is also incorrect in places (Ford Madox Ford’s 'The Good Soldier' is not, as Claridge writes, a First World War novel) and wadded with information that is either self-evident or irrelevant.
Claridge often seems more interested in Blanche's clothes, perfume and makeup than her editorial practices...By book's end, you may feel as frustrated as fascinated by the story Claridge is trying to tell.
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...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.
Few would doubt that Blanche Knopf was denied full credit for all she brought to the success of the company she co-founded. Nonetheless, Claridge depicts her less as a businesswoman or “literary tastemaker extraordinaire,” than as a cosseted, albeit troubled and unhappy socialite who regularly slept around. There is, in fact, a thread of salaciousness that runs through these pages...
...the book has a kind of stolid quality, for all its emphasis on the lurid. Part of the reason, I think, is an almost total reliance on the research of others...To be sure, Ms. Claridge brings her own perspective to these materials (Blanche good, Alfred bad), but when she stitches all the limbs together and throws the switch, the creature lurches around and topples over.
