Alfred A. Knopf
Some years ago, a few of Alfred A. Knopf’s friends began to notice that he was dropping out of sight now and again, for several weeks at a time. When he returned after each disappearance, he seemed rejuvenated. He was garrulous then, and ate his food and smoked his cigars with an uncharacteristic abandon. During those periods he spoke of conditions in Washington and in the publishing business not as worse than usual but merely as bad. In other words, he was ebullient. His friends concluded he was secretly in love. I have long wanted to get to the bottom of this mysterious affair, and this volume gives me, at last, the cherished chance. I have sought out those who shared Alfred’s secret, and they have told me what they know and have even, in some cases, let me see correspondence with Alfred concerning it. I hope that Alfred will not regard publication of this material as an invasion of his privacy, but merely as raw material for the biography that must someday be written about our era’s most remarkable publisher of books. At any rate, the facts are in. Alfred is in love with the national parks.
It all began, it seems, in 1948. “The way Alfred first ‘came upon a national park,’ ” writes Bernard De Voto, “was via B. De Voto. He liked to go on automobile trips but had only done so east of the Mississippi. In connection with his business he had frequently been in the Far West, but only in the cities. He decided that for once he’d drive West and spend four or five weeks doing it. It turned out to be six weeks. He called on me for suggestions and it worked out in the end that I blueprinted the trip. We decided to do a limited trip thoroughly and I made it Montana and Wyoming. I wrote a long compendium—hotels, motor courts, where to buy ranch pants for Blanche, what to see, etc., etc. I wrote Newt Drury about him—that I was sending him to Glacier, Yellowstone, Teton, and the Badlands….”
Newton B. Drury, then Director of the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior, wrote Alfred in April, 1948, saying that De Voto had told him about the projected trip, and offering to give any help he could. Alfred took him up on it, and when his itinerary was ready, he sent it down to Washington. Drury wrote letters to a number of superintendents and custodians, and sent Alfred some circulars.
“Well,” resumes De Voto, “Alfred took my Handy Guide of 1001 Fascinating Facts of Indispensable Information along with him, traveled all the roads I’d specified, ate at all the places, etc. Rogers gave him the works in Yellowstone….”
“During the morning of July 2, 1948,” writes Edmund B. Rogers, Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, “a distinguished-looking couple came into my office. They introduced themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Knopf of New York. The name, of course, was familiar, but I had never met them. They presented a letter of introduction addressed to the Superintendents of several national parks from the Director of the National Park Service. The letter was quite routine, the kind that we receive dozens of each year.” It did not take Rogers long, however, to discover that this was no routine visitor. After an exchange of amenities, they started to explore each other. Rogers soon learned that Knopf had lived his life in New York City and that his world had been books. While he had visited the West before, this was his first trip by car and his first visit to the national parks. He was discovering America, a land to which he confessed himself a stranger. He was deeply interested, but the land’s terrain, philosophy, and mores were absolutely foreign to him. Rogers was excited by Alfred’s excitement—was, he says, “eager to share his adventure”—and soon remarked that Alfred reminded him of Keats’ “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.”
“Finding that I knew something of this strange land,” Rogers writes, “he seized me as his guide. I fortified myself with two competent aids, Joe Joffe, my Administrative Assistant, and Franz Lipp, a landscape architect from Chicago who spends all his spare time and more than his spare money in photographing Yellowstone, and the five of us had lunch together. The philosophy, the hopes, the successes, and the failures of the National Park Service were explored into their darkest corners. Time disappeared under a barrage of questions from them both which came faster than the answers could be made.”
Lipp had been with the Knopfs since the night before. Some time previously, he had corresponded with the publishing firm about the possibility of their doing a book of his photographs of Yellowstone, and a week or so before, he had received a telegram telling him to look for the Knopfs at the Canyon Hotel, in Yellowstone, early in July. When they had arrived at Canyon, he had met them and they had dined together. “Both the Knopfs were exceedingly interested in almost anything,” the landscape architect writes, “and in particular, Mr. Knopf showed quite a knowledge of Rocky Mountain flora, which during their visit was about in its prime.” The following morning the Knopfs and Lipp had driven from the Canyon Hotel over Dunraven Pass, down to Tower Falls, and then to Mammoth, the site of Rogers’ headquarters. After the lunch in the Mammoth Coffee Shop, Rogers took the party in the No. 1 Government Car down to Gardiner, “in order,” as Lipp says, “to introduce the antelopes. These enchanted Mrs. Knopf in particular, who compared them to the chamois of the Alps. There were not too many antelope in this region at that time, but the ones we saw gave a very good display of their galloping, which delighted both of them.”
Since the Knopfs were game to see more of Yellowstone, they went on, with Lipp, first to Norris Geyser Basin, then to the Lower Geyser Basin, where they seemed enthusiastic about the Paint Pots, and to Upper Geyser Basin, to see Old Faithful. “I had a little bit the impression,” Lipp writes, “that they were not too impressed by the display of Old Faithful, but were rather very much impressed by the number of people (mob) from all over the country, gathered around it.” Next they drove over to West Thumb, around Lake Yellowstone, and by way of Hayden Valley back to the Canyon. “At this point,” writes Lipp, “I have to make a confession. As much as I have been out in Yellowstone, I never before made a trip around the entire loop, which is about a hundred and fifty miles, all in one day. I didn’t realize how completely punch drunk one becomes by getting all these very different impressions of all the different phenomena and sights. It resulted in a complete case of fresh air poisoning.” Alfred, however, seemed to take things pretty much in his stride. At dinner, watching the dancers, he remarked dryly that the standard of tango dancing in the West did not come up to that of New York. He and Blanche decided to stay on a couple of extra days.
Superintendent Rogers writes, “The visit of the Knopfs to the Yellowstone, which we playfully refer to as the ‘Education of the Knopfs,’ is one of my cherished adventures in the Park Service. If we gave them anything, the Knopfs gave us much more. We need, every so often, some fresh, alert, and penetrating mind to drive us into taking inventory and appraising ourselves and our concepts and our effectiveness.”
After Yellowstone, De Voto writes, the Knopfs “stayed on a dude ranch in Jackson Hole for more than two weeks. Alfred took thousands of pictures…and the result was he fell in love with the West and especially the parks. When he got back, he was like a kid who had met Santa Claus and made the rounds with him. Why hadn’t anybody told him about this scenery? Why didn’t people in the East know about it? Why were Americans so damn ignorant of their country? He must have made quite a nuisance of himself at dinner parties in New York that winter, for he couldn’t talk about anything else. ‘Benny,’ he said to me once, ‘I’m fifty-six years old and I never suspected this stuff existed. I’m never going to Europe again.’ As a matter of fact he’s been to Europe only once since, and he was a man who thought nothing of going two or three times a year. He was outraged because there weren’t books about the parks—and we know what followed from that.”
Immediately after Alfred’s return to New York, he wrote Director Drury two letters on the same day, one a terse thank-you note, saying, “Mark me as a most enthusiastic friend and admirer of the National Park Service, and call on me whenever, or if ever, there is anything I can do to help you.” In the other, he said, “I would like awfully much to get written and to publish a really good book on the National Parks. But I haven’t an idea where to look for a writer and would welcome any suggestions from you.” Alfred said he had in mind something larger, more comprehensive, and written at a considerably more sophisticated level than anything that had been done previously on the parks. Then, as De Voto noted, he began filling whatever ear he could with the news that the West is magnificent, the parks are magnificent. He had a talk with Drury about the book project in New York on August 27th. On October 19th, about three weeks before an election in which Alfred, along with some other people, assumed that Thomas E. Dewey would be elected President of the United States, Alfred wrote to the Republican candidate about the National Park Service, and enclosed a Marquis Childs column on the subject. A few days later, he wrote to The New Yorker, “I was astonished to find the enclosed advertisement for Yellowstone Whiskey in the pages of your learned family journal. Surely you would not want to spread the notion among your readers that the Teton Mountains and Jackson Lake are in Yellowstone National Park, or would you?” An apologetic letter came from the advertising agency that had prepared the copy, and Alfred wrote back advising the copywriter to go and see the park for himself, and while he was there, to call on Mr. Rogers, the Superintendent, at Mammoth Springs; that would straighten him out. In January, 1950, at the time of hearings on the federal budget, Alfred, having been urged by no one, wrote to sixty-odd “gentlemen on Capitol Hill,” members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, about the National Park Service, saying, “I cannot think of any dollar of the citizen’s money expended by the Federal Government for which the citizen gets, or at any rate can get if he wants to, a finer return”; and asking, therefore, that the respective committees would “deal in a free and generous spirit with the National Park Service.” The letters were not multigraphed.
ALFRED KNOPF IN PARADISE
“I never suspected this stuff existed. I’m never going to Europe again.”
In the meanwhile, several people connected with the Park Service had been making suggestions as to who should write the book Alfred wanted to publish; and De Voto, a member of the National Park Service’s Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments, had also been consulted. Almost everyone agreed that the best possible candidate would be Freeman Tilden, author of A World in Debt, who was thoroughly familiar with the parks and had done some writing about them. By the next June, Tilden had signed a contract for the book. Its preparation took more than a year. “Although I have met Alfred occasionally over the years of my writing,” Tilden writes, “the Parks book is the first on which he has been my publisher. So far as I am concerned, Knopf the Publisher is a man of few words. An instance: when this Parks book was finally from the printer and he showed me a copy in his office, I said, ‘This is certainly a beautiful book.’ He said, ‘Yes, too beautiful.’ I gave way to thoughts one day, in his sanctum, that I foresaw, as a concomitant of the book I was doing, that it might be the basis of a supplementary reading book for the grade schools. He said, with neither sourness nor sweetness, ‘Maybe you had better finish this one first.’ He is the first publisher I ever had who never uttered a saccharine word to me: I incline now to think that is the basis for the best relations between writer and publisher. Anyway, I like it so.” And in the end Alfred liked Tilden’s book; he read the manuscript, he wrote Drury, “with great interest and great pleasure.”
In the summer of 1949, Alfred was not able to get away on a trip to the parks. In June, however, he met Horace Albright, now president of U.S. Potash Company, who was many years ago Superintendent of Yellowstone and who preceded Newton Drury as Director of the Park Service; the resulting friendship intensified Alfred’s interest in the parks. Through Albright, Alfred eventually arranged for the publication of a second book on the parks, a biography of Stephen T. Mather, the pioneering spirit in the founding of the national parks, by Robert Shankland. By the next spring, the Knopfs were off again—to Natchez Trace Parkway and, on the way back, the Blue Ridge Parkway. On June 12th, the Secretary of the Interior, Oscar Chapman, wrote a formal letter to Alfred inviting him to join the Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments of the National Park Service. Accepting delightedly and as formally as he could, Alfred could not resist adding this note to the Secretary: “I know how busy you are, but I hope you will find time at least to glance at a book which my office sent you a while back—America’s New Frontier, by Professor Morris E. Garnsey of the University of Colorado. I suspect it of being a book right up your alley.” The Secretary’s only answer, on July 28th, was a packet containing Form 57, which is an Application for Federal Employment; a waiver of compensation; a fingerprint chart; an affidavit regarding strikes against the United States Government; an oath of office; and a request for loyalty data—none of which could be considered right up Alfred’s alley. Writing Director Drury in August, Alfred exclaimed, “When I received from Secretary Chapman the budget of forms which I have to fill out, well—words fail me!” Words didn’t fail Bernard De Voto, who at the same time was having trouble, because of the intricate paperwork involved, collecting expenses for trips he had taken for the government. “I seem to have run afoul of the accounting office again,” he began a long letter of protest to Drury; and his letter to Herbert Evison, the Chief of Information of the Park Service, ended, “If the United States wants my service any more, it can damn well send a car for me.” (He relented, of course.) In October, when Alfred returned from a brief trip to London, he found “a lifetime’s reading” had been sent him from the Park Service. On the subject of red tape, he wrote Drury, “I doubt that I’ll be as ornery as Benny. It is clear that people by and large are taking lying down this creeping paper attack on them. Without papers today, the citizen literally does not exist, but that’s an old story, for he ceased the kind of existence he was used to in September, 1914, and will never be able to get it back. What I do object to is paying the wages of the kind of people who first have to devise these questionnaires and then check them when they come back. Also, as a publisher who wants paper to print good books on, I object to the amount of paper that these petty bureaucrats consume at my expense.”
Eventually, Alfred enjoyed the meetings of the Advisory Board, and contributed much to them. One of his fellow members, Charles G. Sauers, Superintendent of the Cook County Forest in Illinois, writes, “I came to meet him in Drury’s office and first thought him a brusque person, when, as a matter of fact, he was simply being, as usual, quiet and being, as always, a most accomplished listener. To sit with Alfred at our board meetings, one comes to know his size. His deep sense of orientation, his ability to utilize experience in an orderly manner, his willingness to listen, and his curt and realistic summations are effective indeed. The Advisory Board is composed of eleven members, largely historians, archaeologists, historian-architects, biologists, and the like. Knopf, the publisher, brings to the table a broader perspective and a lifetime of successful experience in the observation and practice of the fine arts. His imperturbability and the feeling of steadiness he conveys are sometimes shoved aside by flashes of unconcealed contempt for irresponsible and half-baked proposals. It is a treat to sit at conference when Knopf and De Voto are in disagreement. Bernard makes one of his headlong proposals, brilliant and tense. Alfred smokes his cigar, handling it with the care its quality deserves, never chewing it. He listens intently and at the same time seems to ruffle through the card index of his mind. He then moves in to analyze the proposal and state his opinions, always with brevity. What a duo!”
Toward the end of 1950, Alfred was in frequent correspondence with Drury and others about the format, wrapper, maps, and so on, for the Tilden book. He asked Drury to write an introduction. In the meantime the book on Mather was made ready for publication and other books on various phases of conservation were in the works. In February, 1951, Alfred and Blanche drove down to the Everglades National Park in Florida. The book about Mather was published in April; the Tilden book in June.
That spring Alfred was also planning his most ambitious exploration of the parks—and indirectly, of himself and of America. With the help of Horace Albright and others, he arranged a very stiff program—Crater Lake, Lassen, the redwood country, Yosemite, and Sequoia and Kings Canyon, with business stops in Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles sandwiched in, all to be accomplished between August 21st and September 12th.
The visit to the redwood country was with Newton Drury, who had retired as Director of the Park Service the previous April and had returned to his native California. Alfred and Drury met at Redding, and drove through dreadful heat over an abominable road, narrow and curving—with Alfred, at the wheel, venting scorn for California drivers—down to the coast. They spent the night at an auto camp at Orick, and when they sat down to eat in a roadside beanery, Alfred pulled out and uncorked a bottle of wine he had brought along for just such a fearful emergency. The next day, driving hard from forest to forest, they took in, more than once, the breathtaking massed effect of pure stands of Sequoia sempervirens and Sequoia gigantea. Alfred snapped many pictures; he seemed impassive in the presence of trees four and five thousand years old, and there were times when Drury was glad he knew him well enough to realize he wasn’t bored—far from it. He also knew him well enough not to tell him what to look at. They wound up, after a long day, at San Francisco.
After several days’ work in San Francisco, Alfred drove with his old friend Floyd H. Nourse to Yosemite. There the superintendent, Carl P. Russell, and his assistant, Ralph Anderson, escorted the pair into the Yosemite high country, to Tioga Pass, down Leevining Canyon to the Mono Basin, and on to the ghost town of Bodie, once the mining center of the Mono Lake region. Dr. Russell thought Alfred particularly enjoyed wandering around the ruins of Bodie; he inspected the old church and ate a box lunch on the front stoop of a long-abandoned home. They returned by way of Bridgeport, where they went into a typical country store, drank soda pop, and chatted with the Mono County people who were shopping, and with a local character named D. V. Cains, whose family had lived in living Bodie. The next day Ralph Anderson took Alfred and Nourse to Glacier Point and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees. On the way to Glacier Point they overtook a party of three women stranded by the road trying to change a tire. Alfred was all for helping them. The three men did the job in record time, then posed for a snapshot at the request of the woman driver. “At Glacier Point,” Dr. Russell writes, “Mr. Anderson looked up the Stuart McCorkles, distinguished visitors from Austin, Texas, and Mr. Knopf was as interested in meeting and advising these people as was Mr. Anderson.” Alfred, Nourse, and Anderson picnicked under a Jeffry pine tree near Sentinel Dome and leisurely returned to Yosemite Valley by way of a section of the old Glacier Point Road. All through the two days, Alfred had spoken with mounting anticipation of the next step on his itinerary—a pack trip in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, where he was going to rough it. He told the others that Superintendent Eivind Scoyen had warned him that the weather might be very cold, and to come well supplied with long johns; and he spoke of what a contrast it would be to go straight from a pack trip in winter woolies in the high country down to Hollywood, where he was to escort Ethel Barrymore to a dinner party with his brother.
The pack trip in Sequoia National Park was the climax of Alfred’s explorations. “Let me say,” Superintendent Scoyen writes, “that the High Sierra of these parks is very rugged terrain. Our elevations run from 1,400 feet to 14,495 feet at summit of Mount Whitney, highest point in the continental United States. We have ten peaks over 14,000 feet, and scores over 13,000. The parks include three of the great canyons of the United States—those of the Kern, South, and Middle Forks of the Kings River. We have somewhat in excess of 400 lakes, and less than a dozen of these occur at an elevation below 10,000 feet.” Alfred had only four days and three nights to devote to this forbidding terrain, which meant that Scoyen was faced with the choice of traveling far and hard each day, or just biting into the edge of the mountain country. In the end, he compromised between the two extremes.
The trip started from the Wolverton Corrals, near the Giant Forest, at an elevation of 7,000 feet above the sea. The party consisted of Scoyen; Alfred; Clarence Fry, a retired Ranger and an old-timer, whom Scoyen took along mainly because of his wide knowledge of the flora and fauna of the parks, and who, though he never went beyond grammar school, could name any of the several hundred plants in the parks accurately by their Latin names; Ray Rundell, Scoyen’s chief clerk; and, as packer, Lou Gannaway, who enlisted in MacArthur’s 2nd Cavalry Division to take care of horses, was “motorized” into a radio operator, served all through the South Pacific campaigns, and then returned to packing in the High Sierra. Each of the five men, of course, had a saddle horse, and there were five mules to carry dunnage, equipment, and supplies. Early-September weather in the high country could be tricky, and “I am sure,” Scoyen writes, “that Alfred would have been rather startled if he had discovered the details of a bundle consisting of sweaters, woolen socks, overshoes, mittens, ear muffs, etc., that I took along to handle a weather situation that could normally be expected.” As it turned out, the weather went to the opposite extreme; it was unusually hot.
Leaving Wolverton, the party rode to the Ranger Lakes. The trail was good until they reached the pass across the Great Western Divide, known as Silliman Pass. From there down to the lakes, they had to pick their way; the going was rough at times. Even the most experienced riders, Scoyen says, spend a good deal of time, when they get off the main trails in the High Sierra, dismounted and leading their horses. Alfred did pretty well. “On that first day out,” Rundell writes, “we had to call him ‘Al,’ because he became one of the gang immediately. From observations of a rider bringing up the rear of four mountain men followed by a string of pack mules, I could only admire the grit, determination, and posterior suffering of Al Knopf in conquering western riding on a western horse, over trails made for squirrels instead of men and horses. I began the trip well reinforced with heavy leather chaps. Al, however, had rather light clothing, I thought, for his comfort in warding off saddle torment. Al rode a horse named ‘Jim,’ who was very tall and took long strides. He was a gentle, plodding beast, but appeared somewhat rough riding, having action in navigating rocks and rough spots not unlike the motion of a camel. Such navigation for Al, who had not ridden for some time, produced considerable anguish for several hours. However, I noticed that by bracing one hand on the cantle of the saddle and the other on the pommel, he was able to produce a posture similar to that of vaulting a fence, so that the horse and saddle could rock violently with no special damage to Al.” The party found a pleasant place to camp at Ranger Lakes. Before nightfall, they caught some fish. “Alfred told me,” Scoyen writes, “that he had never in his life slept in a sleeping bag, therefore we gave him some instructions on how to make up his bed and assisted him this first evening. However, this did not extend to blowing up his air mattress—wind and not experience is required for that.” After all the warnings about winter weather, the night turned out to be hot—“the warmest, I believe,” Scoyen says, “I ever spent in the mountain country. I am quite sure that Alfred was not very comfortable in his fine eiderdown sleeping bag.” Day’s log: ten miles; climbed from 7,000 feet to 10,000 feet; camped at 9,000.
The second day the party made its way through an area known as the Roaring River section and over into Deadman Canyon. “This was really a very hard day even for some of the experienced mountain men in the group,” Scoyen writes, “and Alfred must have suffered a good deal.” Among other things, the temperature was at least twenty degrees above normal, and the trail was unpleasantly dusty. But the party made a wonderful camp that evening in Deadman Canyon beside a mountain stream on the edge of a beautiful meadow. The serrated walls of the canyon on both sides rose up 3,000 feet. Day’s log: sixteen miles; dropped from 9,000 feet to 7,000; camped at 8,200.
“The next day,” Scoyen writes, “we ran into one of those things that travellers with a pack outfit in the mountains dread, but which occur quite frequently—lost stock. Usually the packer gets up at daylight and brings in his string. This is based on two things: first, in the mountains you start operations about daylight, and also your stock will start to wander about that time, just as a matter of principle. We waited about two hours and the packer had not yet returned from his search. Finally he did come back and said he had followed the tracks of mules and horses which he figured were those of our outfit on up the trail for about four miles. However, he came in sight of another camp and, of course, was disappointed to find he had been following the wrong tracks. As soon as we learned what had happened, we started to circle the area where our horses and mules had been grazing, and finally ‘cut’ their sign. Following them, we found they had gotten through the fence on the down stream side of our camp and were grazing peacefully along the trail about a quarter of a mile away!”
The mountain men had promised Alfred that with an early start that third day, they would be able to find him some very good fishing in the evening. But under the circumstances they did not start moving until about ten o’clock and reached camp late, at five in the evening. The trip was up Deadman Canyon, named for a sheepherder who died there seventy years ago, and over Elizabeth Pass, the location of the story in Stewart Edward White’s The Pass and named for his wife. Heavy floods of the year before had done a lot of damage to the trail in the canyon, and much of it had not been repaired. The going, therefore, was slow. Finally the party reached the top of the pass and then went down to the headwaters of the Kaweah River and camped at a place called Lone Pine Meadow. By that time Alfred had lost all interest in an additional three-mile ride to a lake that was famous for its golden trout. Rundell says, however, that “he [Alfred] prepared a fine evening meal with the touch of a German gourmet.” Day’s log: ten miles; climbed from 8,200 feet to 10,200 feet; camped at 9,000 feet.
“The next morning,” Scoyen writes, “which would be our last day on the trail, when everyone woke up, of course his first thought was, ‘Where is the stock?’ Looking around, we saw them high up on the mountainside above camp. Rounding them up was easy, because Lou Gannaway merely let out a few cowboy yells and in a very short time they all came trotting into camp.” That day the party rode back to Wolverton. The Great Western Divide stood at their east as they rode, its peaks rising to 12,000 feet; and mountain slopes broke sharply downward from the trail 5,000 feet into the canyon below. Much of the solid granite around them had been given a high polish by ancient glaciers. As they went downstream, the country became much less rugged. “We were all more or less relaxed,” Rundell says, “in the belief that the most hazardous trails were behind us. We were going down grade when suddenly old Jim’s right front foot slid and wedged between two solid rocks in the trail. I saw him step once with the other three feet, and then the horse seemed to catapult the man off the trail. The horse remained upright, but Al was thrown to the ground close to the horse’s front feet. Neither moved a muscle for what seemed an eternity. The rest of us froze in our saddles for a second so as to prevent exciting old Jim; but he and Al had the situation well in hand with a silent air of nonchalance until Clarence Fry could reach them, while I attempted to keep the other horses quiet. It so happened that the embankment was overgrown with grass and brush which broke the fall, and Al was none the worse for the experience. Considering the country we had been over, the odds for such a thing happening at a place where serious consequences did not result were at least 100,000 to one. Major credit must be given to Jim, who showed that he was a mountain horse of many years’ experience. Most animals, including man, thrash about wildly when they suddenly find themselves with a foot trapped. However, old Jim stood still until the foot was freed. If he had moved at all, most of the footprints would have been on Al.”
“The trail was so dusty,” Scoyen writes, “that I was in the habit of riding far enough ahead so that the air would be clear by the time Alfred came along, therefore I did not see this particular accident and knew nothing about it until the party caught up with me some time later. To say that Alfred was lucky is certainly a mild statement of the situation.” The party went on without event over the High Sierra Trail and reached home at three o’clock. Log: sixteen miles, from 9,000 feet to 7,000 feet.
The story is not yet complete. Alfred is still disappearing from time to time. As this is written, he is off in the Southwest, visiting parks. “Incidentally,” Superintendent Scoyen writes in April, 1952, “I have just received a postcard from Alfred mailed to me from Big Bend National Park, in which he states he has gone back into the mountains again and observes the trails are not nearly as rugged as he found them in these parks. I have spent considerable time in Big Bend also, and assure you that Alfred’s judgment on the matter is sound. However,” Scoyen adds, “he did not indicate his preference.” The trips are not just jaunts now. Alfred is beginning to dig deep. He seems to be exploring not merely terrain, not merely history and inheritance, but something more complex; something to do with our past and our future that has become important to him and that he, as a publisher, would like to make important to others. It is nice to see a man of sixty grown so young. “A thing you have to say of Knopf,” writes Freeman Tilden, “is that he is integral. He doesn’t try to be several other people, and if he doesn’t feel in the mood, he doesn’t invent emotion. We have in the parks, the primeval parks, many look-offs at the roadsides that we facetiously call Oh and Ah. Alfred can take in these surprising tours de force of Nature without saying ‘Oh’ and ‘Ah.’ But he feels the impact where it does him and the Park Service the most good.”
“A.A.K.’s Love Affair,” in Alfred Knopf at 60, privately printed, 1952.