An Unhinged History of American Publishing, Episode 3.2: The Knopf/Doubleday Publishing Group, or: Olympus Unbuttoned

Et in Arcadia ego.

What is the want? What is the need?

If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, I’m sure you’ve heard these questions. They’re central to pretty much every “write good characters” lesson plan.

Give each character you write a want and a need, the thinking goes, and they’ll become interesting almost by default. More important, their development will emerge as instrumental rather than incidental to the movement of your plot. The ability to develop characters without stalling the story is one of those things that separates the authors from the amateurs.

Give a character a want, and however chaotic their behavior might be, your reader will observe them as an astronomer observes a galaxy: each point of light moving in concert, adding up to one big, dazzling, predictable phenomenon.

Give a character a need, and you give your reader a chance to be Isaac Newton, deducing that character’s entire thermodynamic law, the why behind their what, the black hole ordering their galactic gyre.

What is the want? What is the need?

No, you didn’t click the wrong link. This is my latest unhinged publishing history post, and today, we’re focusing on the Knopf-Doubleday Publishing Group.

Follow the asterisks. We’ll get there.

*

On “Seinfeld,” Elaine Benes’ want is to be the next Jackie O. Her need is unconditional love.

Pardon me for momentarily glopping psychobabble all over history’s most mercifully un-psychobabbular sitcom. What Elaine needs is intimacy: safe harbor as the janky-dancing, sponge-hoarding, “Ziggy”-plagiarizing, “Sack Lunch”-loving, authentic delight that she is. But she wants to be a Kennedy.

Early in the series, when we meet Elaine’s snooty, self-centered, hypercritical father, we realize what her problem is. That kind of parent haunts a child for life, forever chasing a narcissist’s vision of success: grandiose, total, and tragicomically unachievable. Ta-da! That’s Elaine.

As a proud Julia Louis-Dreyfus completionist—HAVE YOU LISTENED TO HER PODCAST YET; IT’S AMAZING—I’m pretty sure Elaine’s character arc is ripped from the actress’s real life experience. Louis-Dreyfus, like Elaine, grew up in the generic upper-middle-class Maryland suburbs with her eyes affixed to the Manhattan stars. Louis-Dreyfus, like Elaine, forever hears her Democratic big-wig narcissist dad whispering in her ear: you’re not good enough. You’re not good enough. You’re not good enough.

Louis-Dreyfus, unlike Elaine, has been in therapy for decades. She was therefore able to use her past to shape one of the greatest characters in sitcom history instead of flailing around in it. Have I mentioned recently that therapy is great? Because it is.

*

One of the ways Elaine tries to become Jackie O. is by working in book publishing. Onassis was famously an editor at Doubleday from 1975 until her death in 1994. Elaine tries to follow in her footsteps, but instead of Doubleday, she ends up at Pendant Publishing, a drain-circling lowbrow press run by a hapless hornball. Whoops.

Then a miracle happens: Jackie O. dies. In “The Chaperone”—an episode that aired just after the poor woman died IRL—Elaine scores an interview for her newly-vacant job, then blows it in minute one by tastelessly comparing herself to her idol.

After a little screaming match with Ms. Landis, Doubleday’s willowy, WASPy editor-in-chief, Elaine puts on big sunglasses to hide her shame and takes off for the elevator. On her way, she runs straight into Mr. Pitt, the company’s elderly chairman.

My GOD, he tells her. You look exactly like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. You must agree to let me hire you as my assistant.

Elaine nearly weeps. At last, at last, her dreams are coming true: She has a job at Doubleday.

Needless to say, it all turns out more pathetically than she hoped. Not even Jackie O. herself could live up to her own legend, after all.

*

Elaine Benes, of course, doesn’t really exist. Her “Doubleday” and all the people in it are imaginary.

There’s a real Doubleday, though—the one where Jackie O. actually worked. Another person who worked there, sixty years before her, was a recent college graduate named Alfred A. Knopf. He pronounced his last name with a hard K—Kuh-NOPF—but most of you don’t need to be told that. It’s this industry’s entry-level shibboleth.

Knopf, 20, had just graduated from Columbia. While there, he’d been a highly specific, eternal kind of Columbia campus character. A native New Yorker, born to an ad exec and a homemaker on the Upper West Side, he wore high-end suits around campus everywhere, every day—ones with, like, a purple silk shirt and green tie. As an undergraduate. He also liked fedoras and had a suave mustache. Everyone on campus knew him by sight, and no one really liked him—at least not anyone his age.

Knopf was obsessed with fine art, fine wine, fine music, and above all else, fine books. In social situations, he loved to lecture people about all of these things, loudly. He was relatively handsome and totally unbearable. In lieu of friends, he spent most of his time ingratiating himself with Columbia’s star literature professors—Joel Springarn, Carl van Doren—and, via correspondence, with a middle-aged British novelist, John Galsworthy.

He also had a girlfriend—a hot one. Her name was Blanche Wolf. Don’t be surprised: He was a Mr. Rochester-aesthetic loner who wore bespoke suits and was a famous author’s pen pal! Men like him inevitably attract every codependent young hetero nerdette in a 3-mile radius.

Alfred and Blanche had met at a summer soirée on Long Island in 1911. She was a year younger, a lot shorter, and unbeknownst to him, about ten times smarter than he was. She looked like an anthropomorphic miniature greyhound, only with angrier eyes.

Like Alfred, Blanche was a little much. Like Alfred, she loved to wear luxury clothes and deliver unsolicited lectures about books. Like Alfred, she was from Manhattan—the Upper East Side—and well off; her mom was from nebulous cattle export money. Her Bavarian father had been a day laborer until he emigrated to the States, but until she died, Blanche told people he’d been a Viennese jeweler.

Not long after they met—I wish I were kidding—Alfred told Blanche that she was not like other girls. Like codependent young nerdettes since the beginning of time, she ate it up.

By the time Knopf started at Doubleday, Blanche and he were engaged, and they had a plan.

*

It was going to be the two of them contra mundi. Together, they would be powerful enough to change the world—and change it in such away that involved them earning all the popularity, prestige, and respect that had eluded them as teenagers.

They were going to start a publishing house together. They wanted to do this ASAP, maybe after Alfred got a little work experience at an established house. But not much. They wanted to get started already. This was going to be their fast train to the stratosphere.

In their dreams, their publishing house would be such a towering success that someday soon, industry insiders would compare it to Mount Olympus. They’d be known for taste so exquisite, perception so acute, that whenever authors and agents met them for the first time, they’d be low-key terrified. Perhaps they would also welcome an heir at some point. Whatever happened, it was going to be exciting, and they were going to do it together as full partners and equals.

Every sentence in the above plan eventually came true for Blanche and Alfred. Every sentence except one.

If you’re a woman, I bet you already know which.