LITERATURE WITHOUT LITERATURE

A new essay in 'Granta'

Joseph Hergesheimer.

I have a new piece of criticism out today in Granta 168: Significant Other. Here’s how it begins:

Readers of books from the New York publisher Knopf will be familiar with the leaping dog that appears on their spines. In 1915, when Alfred Knopf started the firm, his wife Blanche was ‘crazy about borzois’, and she suggested the animal as the publisher’s colophon. Though the logo lingers more than a century on, Blanche’s enthusiasm for the breed was brief. ‘I bought a couple of them later,’ she told the New Yorker writer Geoffrey T. Hellman in 1948, ‘and grew to despise them. They were cowardly, stupid, disloyal, and full of self-pity, and they kept running away. One died, and I gave the other to a kennel.’ Hellman relates the story of a weekend in the country when Joseph Hergesheimer, a Knopf bestseller and one of the most critically lauded American novelists of the second and third decades of the twentieth century, came down to breakfast on Sunday morning complaining that the ‘moans and whimpers of the surviving borzoi’ had kept him up all night. ‘I bet Charles Scribner has no such goddam dog,’ he said. ‘The Knopfs exchanged glances,’ Hellman writes, ‘and Mrs Knopf went in for Yorkshire terriers.’

You can read the rest here.