After that first year Niko became financially independent of his father by landing a $3,500-a-year position as a lab instructor. He moved into a dorm at the Graduate College and bought his first car. He paid forty dollars for a yellow 1938 Dodge, then spent another twenty-five on seat covers and a new battery, salvaged a gray fender from a junkyard in Trenton, and spray-painted the whole ungainly mess green. On his trips to Washington Square he would traverse the north Jersey badlands over the Pulaski Skyway, a steel-and-concrete monument to an immigrant: the Polish exile officer Casimir Pulaski, who was awarded honorary citizenship after the Revolution for having saved George Washington’s life.

  My father soon had a new reason to make that trip. Thea Dispeker­—­the exile who had sworn out one of Kurt and Helen’s required affidavits and induced her friend Robert Weinberg to provide the other—now enjoyed a thriving business in New York as a musicians’ representative. Her husband, Lolo Greig, a banker, knew my mother’s father, who practiced law in the city. It was decided that Niko should meet Alex Neave’s daughter Mary, who was studying piano at Manhattan’s Mannes School of Music.

  It would seem to be an unlikely match. Only several years earlier, as a teenager growing up in New Canaan, Connecticut, my mother had hoped for the annihilation of the army of which my father was a part. But trusted introductions and music, which they both loved, smoothed the way. The breakthrough came at Thea and Lolo’s holiday party, where the brunette with the long pianist’s fingers and Gibson Girl silhouette turned Niko’s head. When my mother knocked a tray of hors d’oeuvres onto the wife of Felix Salzer, the Mannes dean who would soon be grading her finals, my father rushed to her side.

  Eleven

  Late Evening

  Kurt, 1947 to 1960

  The New York literary world soon embraced Pantheon Books and celebrated its efforts. An encouraging early sign came when illustrators and translators, eager to attach themselves to the growing prestige of the firm, began to discount their customary fees. The house eventually fared well enough to begin paying Kurt and Helen salaries of $500 and $400 a month, respectively, and in 1949 rented proper office space on Sixth Avenue with views of the Hudson. To the business, the Wolffs supplied complementary talents: Kurt, public and instinctive, comfortable with the sweeping gesture, set the course; Helen wrote sensitive letters and eyeballed manuscripts and translations. “My father was immensely cultivated, but he could bluff,” Maria told me once. “He never would have line-edited four volumes of [Karl] Jaspers.” Helen dug into the Jaspers.

  But even with such green shoots, the business was woefully undercapitalized and often left Kurt scrambling. In 1947 he sold the papers of the old Kurt Wolff Verlag to Yale so the family could live off the proceeds. During trips to Europe he would buy up artwork, usually in small, easy-to-transport formats, that people desperate for food or other staples were willing to pawn. In his own way, he was desperate too. Back in the United States, consigning these treasures to Manhattan art dealers, he would accept a few hundred dollars for pieces that today would fetch tens or hundreds of thousands. He eventually liquidated the prizes of his own collection—works by Paul Klee, Käthe Kollwitz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Pablo Picasso—and at one point auctioned off nearly two thousand Honoré Daumier lithographs, pumping the proceeds back into the publishing house. “I remember my father once saying, ‘I want to show you something,’” Christian recalled. “He called me into a room where he had laid out a large Renoir pastel nude. The next day it was gone.”

  A sentence in a novel Kurt and Helen would publish to much acclaim—The Leopard, by the Sicilian nobleman Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa—captured the conundrum Pantheon Books faced with the turn of the decade: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Peace had failed to deliver prosperity. Kurt judged the fortunes of nearly half of the fifty titles Pantheon published between 1949 and 1951 as either “bad” or “disastrous.” Rising costs of production and shipping failed to meet with the public’s willingness to pay more for a book. My step-grandmother would recall: “I remember Kurt’s coming into the bedroom one day—I can still see him, standing there in the doorway, looking elegant and elegiac—and saying, ‘Helen, do you realize how close we are to bankruptcy?’”

  Two things helped tide the firm over, both extraneous to Pantheon’s season-to-season acquisitions and sales efforts. One was the occasional selection of a title by the Book-of-the-Month Club, which by the end of the war counted almost nine hundred thousand members. The other was the agreement struck in 1943 with the nonprofit Bollingen Foundation and its patroness Mary Mellon, wife of the philanthropist Paul Mellon, to publish a series of lavish books on Jungian themes and the arts, archaeology, literature, mythology, psychology, and religion. The agreement called for Pantheon to be paid a $250-per-month retainer, which during the early years wound up serving as the Wolffs’ sole “salary.” Forty years later, looking back on those days, Helen said flatly that Pantheon “survived because of Bollingen. No more, no less.”

  Pantheon’s board nonetheless heard alarm bells. “The accountant representing our major shareholder, faced with the bottom line of a particularly lean year, admonished management, id est the Wolffs, to look around for greener pastures,” Helen recalled several years before her death. “The arid year was 1954. Then the rains broke.”

  In 1955 Pantheon published Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the wife of the celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh. For Kurt and Helen, the book was a departure twice over. A slight collection of lessons learned during a life lived under public scrutiny, it seemed to hold out little lasting literary value. But the book signaled that Pantheon had gone native. An author from an iconic American family entrusted her thoroughly American story to an immigrant publisher. Knowing what advance orders foretold, Kurt could scarcely contain his gratitude when he wrote the author on the eve of publication.

  I am thinking of you and your gift to us with an undivided heart, weighing it and what it has meant to me, Kurt Wolff, with . . . a sense of the miraculous. I had long since resigned myself to do my work in this country under the sign of Péguy—that is, in relative obscurity, one’s efforts disproportionate to their tangible results, braced and exhausted simultaneously by swimming against the stream. Whenever books were offered us by authors, agents, foreign publishers, they were inevitably the “difficult” ones, with the ones promising success going to the old-established, large American firms. . . . It seemed a fateful, if irrevocable pattern. And that is why, in thinking of your gesture in giving us Gift from the Sea, I used the term “miraculous.” It was just that to me: the free, trusting, generous gift of an uncalculating heart.

  Gift from the Sea sold six hundred thousand copies in hardcover and two million in paperback, certifying Pantheon’s naturalization in the world of American letters. Three years later came confirmation that this breakthrough had done nothing to diminish the firm’s reputation as a safe harbor for imported literature. The Russian writer Boris Pasternak granted world rights to Doctor Zhivago to an Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who in turn reached out to Pantheon through a British go-between with an offer of US rights. At the height of the Cold War, Kurt and Helen were entrusted to position the book as a literary title, not a political one, for in addition to selling the novel short, any false marketing step could imperil the author, a dissident in the Soviet Union.

  Kurt would never meet his Russian laureate. After Doctor Zhivago became a global best seller, the Soviets kept Pasternak confined largely to his dacha outside Moscow and ultimately refused to allow him to accept the Nobel Prize. But my grandfather did his best to jerry-build a relationship on that favorite place of his, the page. Like Kurt, Pasternak had studied in Marburg, with many of the same professors, including the Kant and Plato scholar Hermann Cohen. Before the hammer of the Kremlin came down, Kurt wrote his author with the hope that they would soon have a chance to meet and reminisce about Marburg and Cohen—“perhaps,” Kurt suggested, “in Stockholm toward the end of 1958.” Meanwhile, he updated him on the reception of Doctor Zhivago in the United States, where a reviewer at a Chicago TV station had highlighted the novel’s lessons for Americans, who might now be inspired to stand up to oppressions built into their own system: “How quickly do we give in—to the boss, to the main chance, to the quick buck. How readily do we ‘play it safe, not half-safe’? What excuse do we find—in our personal life, in our business life, our life as Americans not to ‘rock the boat’—to relax, to conform, to play along.”

  Fishing for endorsements for the book, Kurt had sent copies to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. But he tamps down expectations that blurbs will be forthcoming. “Both are great writers, of course,” he told Pasternak. “But both are unreliable, seldom or never write letters, and both are alcoholics.”

  In 1942, Pantheon had originally listed Kyrill Schabert as president of the firm because he made for a more sensible face of the company during wartime than an enemy alien like Kurt. By the late fifties, the two had become estranged. In the run-up to the publication of Doctor Zhivago, Kurt and Helen watched Schabert side with the sales manager, who insisted that Russian novels didn’t sell. Now, as readers worldwide bought more than a million copies in a matter of weeks, Schabert took a victory lap as Pantheon’s titular head. Kurt and Helen seethed at what they saw as hypocrisy.

  Several years earlier Kurt had come home from the office one day “shaken and white-faced,” in Helen’s words. He had just been told he wasn’t Pantheon’s publisher, but its editor, even as the original letter of intent, drafted in 1941 by Schabert’s stepfather, Curt von Faber du Faur, stipulated that Pantheon would be “headed up” by Kurt Wolff. “This is the first time in my life I’ve been told I’m not a publisher,” he said to his wife.

  In a November 29, 1958, letter to John Lewis, chairman of Pantheon’s board, Kurt takes up the distinction, surely with an assist from his spouse.

  Some misunderstanding may have arisen for semantic reasons: what and who is a publisher?

  First and foremost, it is a man of literary tastes with a sound knowledge of world literature and of contemporary writing, with a feeling for quality and style, and with both judgment and intuition as to what may appeal to the reading public. Publishing is both a business and an art, that is why it is such a fascinating and challenging profession, demanding the whole man, the whole life. A publisher in my definition of the term must be sympathetic to the creative process and to that most difficult and neurotic creature: the creative artist in the throes of production. But that is not all: he must have a sound knowledge of book production and its various techniques, a taste for book design; he has to keep in touch with the intellectual opinion makers, critics and scholars, and speak their language; he must know where to go for advice.

  This over-all knowledge distinguishes a publisher from an editor. Editors as a rule do not determine policy; they rarely have a knowledge of production; they are relieved from the burden of coordination. It is the publisher who sees to all that, who carries the ultimate responsibilities for this intricate business beset by deadlines. He has to have the experience and the ability to work with such different people as authors, artists, printers, designers and, in a house such as Pantheon in particular, he also has to have a thorough knowledge of the European publishing scene and its leading figures.

  Whether he had been a success or failure as a publisher, Kurt added by way of conclusion, he would leave to others. But he had

  tried to live up to this definition, and to create for Pantheon a certain prestige, not only by the books we published but also by those we did not—no crossword puzzles, no mysteries, no lurid sex stories, etc.

  To me, the division between Kyrill’s and my own functions . . . has always seemed reasonable and logical: Kyrill kept up contact, and very ably, with people in the book trade and with various publishing organizations and committees in the U.S. I devoted myself to what I consider the hard core of publishing. We moved in different circles; but that does not mean that Kyrill was the publisher and I the editor. The final responsibility for what Pantheon stands for is with me.

  But that does not mean that I was unable and unwilling to work with Kyrill as a team. We have done it in the beginning, and successfully. It was only when I realized that Kyrill was no longer promoting Pantheon as a firm built by the three of us, but as his personal platform, that he appointed himself head and delegated to myself and Helen the status of “his staff,” that my sense of justice and equity became outraged.

  For all his written flatteries, Kurt could fire off a good j’accuse, like the letter he sent Schabert that same month: “You are not a publisher and you never will be. You are an illiterate in literature, you cannot differentiate between a good book and a bad book, not even between a marketable and an unmarketable one. . . . I am not in need of publicity, but I refuse, at my age, to be ridiculed by your conceitedness and your craving for recognition.”

  Members of Pantheon’s board shared legitimate concerns about Kurt’s age, health, and lack of a clear successor. And Schabert himself had plenty of skin in the game, having personally loaned the company $15,000 and mortgaged some of his own assets on its behalf during the lean years. But the triumph of Doctor Zhivago—vaunted in ads like this one pictured, from the New York Times, with copy Helen wrote—brought to a head something more fundamental: a philosophical split within the house. Pantheon suddenly found itself with a windfall, and the prospects for a firm long content with its particular “physiognomy,” as Helen liked to say, were no longer a matter of theory. American publishers now competed for the rights to sell textbooks to the school districts beginning to educate the baby boom generation. This would lead Wall Street to take more interest in the sector, sparking mergers and takeovers; publishers were fated to become merely one division within a conglomerate, expected to supply a healthy contribution to the greater bottom line. Kurt and Helen championed the idealistic side in this incipient debate, arguing that high literary standards would deliver adequate financial returns over the long term. But Schabert and two like-minded board members wanted to take Pantheon down a more modern, commercial path—and they held the cards. The irony was especially bitter. A best seller, delivered to the house because of trust in the Wolffs’ discretion and reputation, forced a confrontation that Kurt and Helen would lose. In a sense, history foretold it. The cultural historian Anthony Heilbut likens German refugee intellectuals in the United States to the European court Jews of old, men like Kurt’s ancestor Salomon von Haber. “They exerted great authority in some areas, but in other places they remained vulnerable,” Heilbut writes. Life on both sides of the Atlantic ultimately delivered “alarm and betrayal.”

  The internal tumult over Doctor Zhivago caused Kurt to suffer a flare-up of a heart condition diagnosed a decade earlier. His papers include a spiral-bound notebook with several sentences scratched out in pencil, undated but clearly from 1958 or ’59. “I’m in the late evening of my life, and take leave of the work that has consumed me completely for the past seventeen years, activity in which I have invested more time, diligence, passion than even during the European chapter of my career,” he writes. “I’m sick. Of course K[yrill] isn’t to blame for my illness. But I regard him as its cause.”

  Kurt and Helen decided to abandon the poisonous atmosphere in the New York office for Switzerland, ostensibly to set up a Pantheon European branch. They had personally shared in the profits from the Lindbergh and Pasternak best sellers, and to help fund a new chapter chose to cash out their stake in the firm, even at the cost of seats on the board and a sharp reduction in salaries. But the move wasn’t all retreat and defeat. “My father was a great conversationalist whose English was never that good,” Christian once told me. “In New York he always felt at a disadvantage.” Back in Europe this most gregarious of men would once again find himself on the social front foot. In April 1959, Kurt dashed off a note to Hermann Hesse to let him know that he and Helen would soon be his neighbors. The enthusiast-on-the-page was back at it, telling Hesse how much he enjoyed rereading an essay of his on the consolations of old age. That spring Kurt and Helen relocated to Locarno in the Italian-­speaking Ticino, taking an apartment in the Hotel Esplanade overlooking Lake Maggiore. They formally left Pantheon a little more than a year later.

  In 1970, Helen would respond to a friend who had proposed a book to enlighten Americans about her late husband’s life and work. “I cannot help feeling that Kurt would not want it, because of his traumatic experience in this country as a publisher,” she wrote, recapitulating the conflict that led them to leave New York.

  Kurt left America a broken man, physically and psychologically. (I’m not being hysterical or exaggerating. When he shuffled to the plane that was taking us to Zurich, Niko and Christian were convinced that this was their last time to see their father.) . . . Under his gentle and dignified manners he suffered acutely. In July 1960, after his resignation from the firm, he entered into a commonplace book a series of quotations which culminated in “An old man always is a King Lear.” This was ten years ago, but I still can hardly bear to read or write it.