Muse: A Novel Read online

  Also by Jonathan Galassi

  POETRY

  Left-handed

  North Street

  Morning Run

  TRANSLATIONS

  Annalisa Cima, Hypotheses on Love

  Giacomo Leopardi, Canti

  Eugenio Montale, Collected Poems, 1920–1954

  Eugenio Montale, Otherwise: Last and First Poems

  Eugenio Montale, Posthumous Diary

  Eugenio Montale, The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Galassi

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Galassi, Jonathan.

  Muse : a novel / Jonathan Galassi.

  pages ; cm

  “This is a Borzoi book”—Title page verso.

  ISBN 978-0-385-35334-2 (hardcover)—

  ISBN 978-0-385-35335-9 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3557.A387M87 2015 813.54—dc23 2014025424

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Front jacket photograph by Erik Asla / Gallery Stock

  Jacket design Gabriele Wilson

  v3.1_r1

  For my heroes

  (you know who you are);

  for Beatrice and Isabel,

  my heroines;

  and in loving memory of Ida Perkins

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I: Homer and Company

  II: The Ingénue

  III: Home at Last

  IV: The World of Sterling Wainwright

  V: The Outerbridge Notebooks

  VI: Lost in Hiram’s Corners

  VII: Sunny Days at P & S

  VIII: The Fair

  IX: Dorsoduro 434

  X: Mnemosyne

  XI: Publishing Scoundrel

  XII: A Call to Hiram’s Corners

  XIII: Mr. President

  XIV: The Man from Medusa

  XV: Eastport

  The Poetry of Ida Perkins

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  This is a love story. It’s about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books, with glued or even sewn bindings, cloth or paper covers, with beautiful or not-so-beautiful jackets and a musty, dusty, wonderful smell; when books furnished many a room, and their contents, the magic words, their poetry and prose, were liquor, perfume, sex, and glory to their devotees. These loyal readers were never many but they were always engaged, always audible and visible, alive to the romance of reading. Perhaps they still exist underground somewhere, hidden fanatics of the cult of the printed word.

  For these happy few, literature was life, and the slowly burning pages on which it took shape were the medium of their cult. Books were revered, cherished, hoarded, collected, given, and sometimes borrowed, though seldom returned. The rarity of an item—the number of copies in an edition, the beauty and complexity of its printing, occasionally the quality of its contents—determined its value. Once in a great while, a book was deemed to be worth millions. Works that bore the signature of their authors were objects of veneration, displayed under lock and key in the inner sancta of great libraries and museums. Writers—in those days, only a few assumed the mantle of authorship, a demanding and even dangerous vocation—were the high priests of this religion, shunned and held in suspicion by the unwashed but idolized by the initiated faithful.

  This is the story of some of the truest of this religion’s true believers. They came into their own in the heady days after World War II when everything seemed possible, and in subtle ways they changed the culture they lived in, made it richer, deeper, more exciting and full of promise. Richness and depth are qualities not much in vogue in these days of speed and instantaneous transformation. Our virtual world is a flat world, and we relish this about it. We change identities at the drop of a hat; we pivot, regroup, reconfigure, reinvent. The characters in this story are different. They were loyal to their own sometimes twisted yet settled natures, modern in the old-fashioned sense. And in their own selfish ways, they were heroes.

  This is also the story of our country’s love affair with one of its great poets. Ida Perkins streaked across the sky of American life and letters as a very young woman and remained there in one way or another until her death in 2010 at the age of eighty-five. While she lived, her every word and movement was noted and commented on, lionized, bemoaned. Our critics—most of them, anyway—fell down before her, but so did the commonest of common readers. She made poetry fans out of ordinary women and men, and when she died, the outpouring of national grief was such that President Obama designated her death day, which was also her birthday, a national holiday.

  All of Ida’s many lovers remained devoted to her; and all of them searched for, and found, reflections of themselves and of her love for each of them in her poems. But there were others who pined for her in unrequited fashion, who could know her only through her words—the readers who faithfully bought book after book over Ida’s long career; the editors who dreamed of publishing her; the young poets who sat at her feet when she let them and swooned to be her swains; the critics who continue today to discover and invent the meanings of her infinitely various oeuvre; and the scholars who for decades to come will be poring over the many writings she left behind: poems, essays, unfinished memoirs and fiction and plays, and notebooks, many of them as yet unavailable—everything but letters, for Ida never wrote, or kept, personal correspondence. Presumably she received countless missives from admirers as various as Pound, Eliot, Avery, Moore, Stevens, Montale, Morante, Winslow, Char, Adams, Lowell, Plath, Olson, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cheever, Hummock, Burack, Erskine, O’Hara, Merrill, Gunn, Snell, Vezey, Styron, Ashbery, Popa, Bachmann, Milosz, Merwin, Sontag, Carson, Nielsen, Glück, Cole, and McLane—to name only a few of her closest literary associations. But though she no doubt read many of their letters, as far as we can tell she kept none of them, and all of her correspondents knew better than to expect a reply. Words, for Ida, were meant to be whispered conspiratorially (and deniably), or else committed irrevocably to the page. Her instantly recognizable breathy voice—for a high-wattage intellectual star, she came across as exceedingly shy—was part and parcel of what her second and by common consensus most beloved husband, Stephen Roentgen, called her “lifelong need to seem normal.”

  Ida disliked talking about literature; she felt it was dull, unworthy: shoptalk. Cooking, gardening, pictures, sex, and politics were her preferred topics of conversation. And gossip. Always gossip. She was reputedly one of the world’s best storytellers, though with a forgiving lilt to her voice that could make the worst crimes come across as mere peccadilloes.

  Among her most loyal acolytes were two of the significant publishers of her time: Sterling Wainwright, founder and presiding genius of prestigious, influential Impetus Editions, who was also her second cousin, first love, and principal publisher; and Homer Stern, king of Purcell & Stern, Sterling’s brash and brassy rival, who long carried a torch for Ida—and may have extinguished it at least once or twice in Ida’s early New York years. And there was Paul Dukach, who had the luck to be a young editor at the r
ight moment at Homer’s scrappy but consequential firm. Paul worshipped Ida from afar, with a devotion that sometimes made him sick with yearning unworthiness—the kind of feverish attachment that if you’re not careful can burn its unknowing object to a crisp. Eventually, this young man’s passion for Ida would transform the trajectory of her work and change the lives of all of them.

  We make so much of love. We live for it, we ache for it, we convince ourselves that we’ll die without it and make the search for it the focus of our lives. Yet love, my friends, is a terrible pain. It distracts us; it sucks up time and energy, makes us listless and miserable when we’re without it and turns us into bovine creatures when we find it. Being in love is arguably the least productive of human states. It is not, as so many believe, synonymous with happiness. So when I say this is a love story, I’m telling you it’s not entirely a happy story. It is what it is—the raw truth, the fabric of our heroes’ and heroine’s messy lives, the scent of their days and nights, the marrow of their souls. Proceed with caution.

  I

  Homer and Company

  “Fuck the peasants!”

  That ancient cry off the Russian steppe was the trademark toast of Homer Stern, founder, president, and publisher of the tony, impecunious independent publishing house Purcell & Stern. He raised a glass with it often at dinners celebrating his authors’ victories or, better yet, defeats, after the numerous award ceremonies that punctuate the publishing year. Homer’s salute to his warriors divided the world cleanly into us and them—or maybe it was me and them—a spot-on reflection of his Hun-like worldview.

  Homer was a womanizer, and he made no particular effort to hide it. It was part of the broad advertisement of self that some found disarming and just as many detested. To his fellows, his frank appreciation of female horseflesh jibed with his loud, nasal upper-class New York accent and loud, expensive clothes—“On him they look good,” Carrie Donovan allowed in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar—and his taste for Cuban cigars and Mercedes convertibles. It had taken him years to buy a German car after the war, but his fondness for luxury and display eventually won out over any lingering historical or religious compunctions. Homer exuded a kind of leftover, gently down-at-the-heels German Jewish droit du seigneur that was only slightly put on. He’d inherited it from his father, the grandson of a lumber baron who’d made a fortune out West when the First Transcontinental Railroad needed ties by the boxcar. That was a long time ago, though, and the Stern family coffers were nowhere near as full of dollars as they had been, after three generations of dilution without replenishment. As with many who live on inherited wealth, Homer’s sense of what money can buy hadn’t kept pace with inflation. He was a famously chintzy tipper.

  Still, he reveled in the bella figura that let him give the impression of being much better off than he was. He once told his son Plato that looking rich made it easier to put off paying his printing bills; his printer of choice, Sonny Lenzner, would always assume he could pay up when he got around to it. As his wife, Iphigene Abrams, likewise an heiress, to a faded Newark department store fortune, was quoted as saying, not without pride (they had married almost in arranged fashion at twenty-one and were to remain together through thick and thin for sixty-three years), “Homer likes nothing better than walking a tightrope over the abyss.” Iphigene published a series of neo-Proustian memoir-novels in the seventies and eighties that had been highly regarded by some. Many were amused by her Edwardian-era bluestocking affectations—billowing chiffon gowns and garden hats, or jodhpurs and riding crop—as if she wanted it to be known she was a throwback and proud of it. She was the perfect foil to Homer’s Our Crowd Mafioso showiness. They made quite a pair.

  Stern was the last of the independent “gentlemen” publishers, scions of Industrial Revolution fortunes of greater or lesser magnitude who’d decided to spend what remained of their inheritance on something that was fun for them and perhaps generally worthwhile, too. College right after the war—he’d attended a series of institutions of descending degrees of seriousness, always managing to get himself thrown out before graduation—was followed by a stint in the army’s public relations branch, where he’d done his damnedest to sell enlistment via jingle and poster to a conflict-weary public. He’d also acquired a penchant for inventive profanity, which, combined with the Yiddishisms he’d picked up later on, when he and Iphigene got interested in their Jewish roots, made for a delicious idiomatic goulash all his own.

  When Homer set out, in the dark days of the fifties, to start a publishing house with Heyden Vanderpoel, a wealthy WASP tennis buddy of his, he’d invited Frank Purcell—“Like the composer,” he invariably said on being introduced, in case someone might mistakenly put the accent on the second syllable—to join them. Frank was a once-celebrated editor from an older generation who’d been unceremoniously cut loose from his previous job while he was off in Korea. In the end, Vanderpoel’s mother had objected to his linking his impeccable name with a Jew’s, and Heyden hadn’t wanted to work nine to five anyway, so it was just Homer and Frank: Stern and Purcell. Or Purcell and Stern, as Frank had insisted, reasonably enough. They set up shop and waited for something to happen.

  Eventually something had. The fledgling company struggled along for a while on the occasional commercial best seller: nutrition bibles and the collected speeches of various governors and secretaries of state—remember, this was the fifties—with now and then a high-toned foreign novel recommended by one or another of Homer’s European scouts, pals from his army days now working, some muttered sotto voce, as undercover operatives for the CIA. It wasn’t until the mid-sixties, though, that Homer convinced Georges Savoy, a French émigré with a genuine feeling for writing and a well-stocked stable acquired during a productive but turbulent career at Owl House, to come work with him and Frank that Purcell & Stern jelled. Soon enough, through the alchemical fusion of Georges’s taste and connections with Homer’s salesmanship—not to mention the contributions of a series of young staffers who slaved twelve or fourteen hours a day at abysmal wages for the privilege of being associated with Greatness—P & S emerged as a force to contend with in literary publishing, a kind of rocket of originality.

  It wasn’t just Pepita Erskine, the taboo-smashing firebrand African American critic and novelist, who set the tone at the firm. There was Iain Spofford, the pernickety New Journalist who ruled at The Gothamite, known to many as “The Newer Yorker,” which had recently emerged as America’s premier cultural weekly. There were Elspeth Adams, queen of the icy sonnet, and Winthrop Winslow, the confessional Brahmin novelist, and the scholarly, subtly subversive critic Giovanni Di Lorenzo—writers who were defining a generation in letters and who introduced Homer and Georges to a gifted younger generation, among them the trio of eventual Nobel Prize–winning poets whom Homer dubbed the Three Aces.

  And there was Thor Foxx. Thornton Jefferson Foxx was a not-so-good ol’ boy from the hills of Tennessee with a Colonel Sanders goatee who swore like a trucker and whose irreverent debunking of New York literary pretension had won him instant fame in the pretension-strewn canyons of Gotham. Thor and Pepita were the proverbial oil and water, and it was a tribute to Homer and Iphigene’s Fred and Ginger–like social skills that these two cornerstones of the P & S list could show up simultaneously in the crush of one of the Sterns’ coveted at-homes in their stylishly moderne East Eighty-third Street town house and not bump into each other.

  So P & S surprisingly quickly became a legend in publishing circles. And that was where the trouble between Homer and Sterling Wainwright began. P & S came to be regarded as the smallest, scrappiest, and most “literary” of the “major” publishers, while Wainwright’s Impetus Editions, for all its cultural impact and influence (Sterling had had half a decade’s head start on Homer, to be fair), was considered the largest and most esteemed of the small presses, another world altogether. And though Homer was stingy with author advances, Impetus was cheaper still—much, much cheaper. Even so, there was signific
ant overlap, and when the cocky young Jewish American writer Byron Hummock left Impetus for P & S after the publication of his prizewinning book of stories, All Around Sheboygan, war was declared. And it had never ended.

  Wainwright, a card-carrying WASP from Ohio whose inheritance (ball bearings) trumped Stern’s by a factor of ten (some said much more), regarded Homer as a crass and ill-mannered upstart opportunist, not a man of his word—a time-honored defense for someone who’s been bested in the rough-and-tumble of business. Homer derided Sterling as a playboy indulging his literary pretensions without any practical acumen or publishing savvy. Which was kind of rich when you thought about it, given Homer’s own background. No, the trouble was not what separated Sterling and Homer; it was how alike they were. Both were spoiled, handsome, charming ladies’ men with a nose for writers. You might have thought they’d be natural pals, but you’d have been dead wrong. They cordially detested each other, and greatly enjoyed doing so.

  Something else Sterling and Homer shared was an obsession with the poetry and person of Ida Perkins, arguably the representative American poet of their era. To each of them she was the embodiment of writerly—not to mention feminine—desirability. Sterling, of course, adored, revered, and published his cousin Ida; but Homer had his own attachment to her. They’d been introduced by one of Homer’s writers, Giovanni Di Lorenzo, who’d had unrequited feelings of his own for Ida, and predictably enough, Homer had been dazzled by the fatally brilliant redhead. The rumor, which he was capable of putting about himself, was that they had shared their own “moment in time,” as he liked to call his affairs. Nobody knew for sure, but the frequency and tenderness of Homer’s allusions to Ida were an index of something for those with ears to hear. Ida, as both an attention-grabbing literary star and an alluring female, was a kind of Holy Grail for him, not dissimilar to, though if anything more fetishized and coveted than, “Hart, Schaffner, and Marx,” as he called the leading Jewish American novelists of the late sixties, Abe Burack, Byron Hummock, and Jonathan Targoff, of whom he never managed to capture more than two at any one time, try as he might.