Muse: A Novel Read online

  He was determined to make sense of Ida once and for all, why she’d mattered so much—to him, but not just him. He had the Complete Poems beside him: twelve hundred pages of immortality, with her sunlit face on the back of the jacket, lifted from Ida B’s snapshot of her namesake holding hands with Maxine and Sterling on the dock at Hiram’s Corners. That impassive smile, like an archaic kouré’s, hid far more than it revealed. He was working to find his way behind it, to get at her essential nature.

  He’d recently learned something sad about Ida’s last years in Venice. Aristotle Stern had called him to report that he’d seen his now-aged relation Celine Mannheim in New York, and she’d had surprising things to say about Leonello Moro. According to Celine, the count hadn’t coped well with Ida’s growing infirmity and had made himself increasingly scarce, spending more and more time in Barcelona. Ida had lived out her final months a solitary prisoner in Palazzo Moro.

  Paul was distressed to imagine Ida, who had been with someone her whole life, unhappy and weak and alone. He wondered if her decision to give him Mnemosyne might have been motivated less by concern for protecting—or wounding—Sterling, than by her pressing need, as Paul had somehow intuited, to save her last book from a neglectful husband’s indifference or even envy.

  Slowly, he was beginning to comprehend how one-sided, and how two-dimensional, his love for Ida and all his writers had been. It was intrinsic to the relationship; they’d needed him to magnify them in order to be fully, uninhibitedly themselves. And he’d needed to do it, to be of use, to bask in their reflected aura. It was a way of keeping his distance, of staying out of the line of fire. With Joel, he was beginning to learn the risks of mutuality. Did that mean his love for Ida was something he had to put behind him, like his fruitless enthrallment with Jasper, which had left him safely unexposed?

  Ida had surely been no saint. His afternoon with her had shown him he would have to appraise her from countless contradictory angles. Yet the more faceted and surprising she’d become for him, the more she meant. Ida had been guileless and willful, passionate and snobbish, generous, great-hearted, self-seeking, myopic, petty. Like so many artists, she’d pursued her own desires, ignoring the consequences for others—and herself. She’d also suffered the worst loss a human being could know and found the inner discipline to absorb and master it. And in her words, at least, she had always been cognizant of her actions:

  How can I tell you

  the way it was?

  Wasn’t it always

  the same way for you?

  There is nothing else.

  If we knew what we knew,

  every instance

  would have to be true.

  Ida, when she was most herself, had lived the way she wrote: at white heat, without backtracking or revision. That’s what her lines kept saying: this was how it was meant to be, how it could be, if only you let it. Because life was what it was. There is nothing else. And it was enough. It had to be, by definition.

  Had he, too, left her in the lurch? Had he deserted his mentors Homer and Sterling when he’d left P & S? The company seemed to be thriving under Lucy, according to everything he heard from Tony and Momo and Seth. Daisy and her crew were finding and acquiring wonderful books, as always, and often—not every time, but it had been ever thus—finding engaged readers for them. Maybe he’d go back, if he ever finished his own book, and join forces with Jas, or kick-start his own latter-day Impetus or P & S with contributions from the grateful authors he’d worked with over the years.

  Or maybe not.

  Meanwhile, Ida was everywhere. Her work was read on the radio, quoted in songs and movies, imitated, discussed, debated. It felt as if she’d never had more readers. Both Impetus and P & S were selling p- and e-book editions of her steadily; more often than not, she was the best seller in Rufus’s Perennial Poets category, one of the most happening spots on the Medusa site. (Go figure!) Prizes, university chairs, even a highway in her native Massachusetts were being named for her. Her life was the subject of the new opera by John Adams, and her profile was set to appear on a postage stamp—if anyone still used stamps. The flat in Venice that she’d shared with Arnold had become a writers’ residence; Paul would be spending three months there in the spring. Thanks to Ida’s influence, the memorizing and recitation of poetry had miraculously become a part of the English curriculum again in certain schools. Children were learning her by heart, the way he had all those years ago.

  Ida was alive, as alive as anything. She didn’t need Paul any more than she’d needed Sterling or Homer, or Arnold—or any man, or woman—to be triumphantly herself in her afterlife, even if her earthly end had been hard. Her mes sage, her genius, had been handed on, not via biology, but through the DNA locked inside her syllables. For all its greed and heedlessness, its ignorance about its past and insouciance about its future, America had produced a universal artist in Ida Perkins—in much the same way it had made a place as serene as Eastport, with its long stonewalled fields sloping down to the water, its aged, sea-stunted trees and silver houses huddled in front of the rocks that lined the shore of the Point. Some things in life can’t be improved on. He couldn’t imagine how Eastport could be more beautiful, more reassuringly humane. And the same was true of Ida.

  Though it seemed eternal, Paul knew Eastport had changed greatly over the years. The stateliness of its vistas, its opennesses and secrets, whispered gently but insistently of creative destruction. Like every place, Eastport was always on the way to being something else, moving so slowly it seemed to be standing still to whoever reveled momentarily in its timelessness. We’re all just along for the ride. You could find it terrifying if you wanted to. But to Paul it felt healing, consoling.

  Paul had changed, too—he’d lost his innocence, several times over; he’d fallen and been wounded; he’d erred and failed. He’d been guilty of cupidity, of calculation, of dissembling. He hoped he’d been forgiven by Sterling’s ghost, wherever he was. If Sterling had turned out to be less than impeccably heroic, it was only because of the outsize shadow Paul had compelled him to cast in Paul’s fevered imagination. Sterling was as important to him now as he’d ever been—and Homer, too, in all his testosterone-fueled glory. Time was slowly settling them into the honored niches they would occupy in his helter-skelter imagination.

  Paul stared at the line of the ocean and sensed a force gathering unlike anything he’d ever known: a wave still invisible on the horizon, coming at them. It was as if they were about to relive the legendary hurricane of 1938, when the ocean had risen up and smashed Pawcatuck Point and the entire Eastern Seaboard. The shanties at Pawcatuck had been pulverized and washed away; islands had been submerged; peninsulas had turned into islands. In many places the water had flowed in and never flowed back out.

  He could almost see the new wave rising to the south, climbing higher, gray on gray; he could practically hear it, roaring in his ear till it became another kind of silence. What would it bring? Dissolution. Purification. Renewal. Everything would be swept clean, and reconstituted: virgin again. Out with the old; in with the aftermath. It was time to start over.

  Paul loved this view, its primal constancy even in the worst weather. He loved the repetitive heaving of the ocean. And he would love it too after the storm, maybe more than before.

  He opened Ida’s Complete Poems and for the thousandth time read the poems of Mnemosyne.

  GOLDENROD

  Mnemosyne remembers as she sits

  and stares across

  the water every day

  hard as she tries

  she finds there’s no reprise

  far too much

  evades her failing eyes

  but always she sees hair and forehead

  lips meeting lips

  and skin on ageless skin

  she summons its faint mineral scent

  and knows what she remembers isn’t sin

  and though she can’t have back

  each gone embrace

/>   each breath each hopeless kiss

  she knows she does own this

  the last time

  that she watched you turn

  to trace your footsteps

  through the goldenrod

  she remembers

  that she heard you call

  miss you darling

  see you in the fall

  Mnemosyne remembers that was all

  The Poetry of Ida Perkins

  A Concise Bibliography

  Virgin Again (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1942).

  Ember and Icicle (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1945; London: Faber & Faber, 1946).

  Aloofness and Frivolity (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1947; London: Faber & Faber, 1948).

  In Your Face (New York: Impetus Editions, 1950).

  Bringing Up the Rear (New York: Impetus Editions, 1954; London: Faber & Faber, 1955) [translated by Renée Schorr as Mes Derrières (Paris: De Noël, 1956)].

  Striptease (London: Faber & Faber, 1957 [includes In Your Face]; New York: Impetus Editions, 1958). National Book Award for Poetry, 1958; Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1959.

  The Face-lift Wars (New York: Impetus Editions, 1963; London: Chatto & Windus, 1963).

  Nights in Lausanne (Cadenabbia: Drusilla Mongiardino, 1964; incorporated into Arte Povera, 1982).

  Exquisite Emptiness (Geneva: Éditions de L’Herne, 1965; incorporated into Half a Heart, 1967).

  Half a Heart (New York: Impetus Editions, 1967; London:

  Chatto & Windus, 1969) [translated by Elsa Morante as Cuore dimezzato (Genoa: Edizioni del Melograno, 1973)]. National Book Award, 1967.

  Remove from the Right (New York: Impetus Editions, 1970; London: Faber & Faber, 1971) [translated by Ingeborg Bachmann as Aus dem Rechten (Hamburg: Festiverlag, 1974)].

  Barricade (New York: Impetus Editions, 1972; London: Faber & Faber, 1973) [translated by Claude Pélieu-Washburn and Mary Beach as Les fortifications intérieures (Geneva: Editions de la Trémoille, 1980)].

  The Brownouts (London: Faber & Faber, 1974; New York: Impetus Editions, 1975).

  Translucent Traumas: Selected Poems (New York: Impetus Editions, 1975). National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 1976; Pulitzer Prize, 1976.

  Doggy Days (St. Louis: Ferguson, Seidel & Williams, 1979; Hamburg: Festiverlag, 1982).

  Arte Povera (New York: Impetus Editions, 1982; London: Faber & Faber, 1982) [translated by Harry Mathews under the same title (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986)]. National Book Award, 1982.

  Marginal Discharge (New York: Impetus Editions, 1987).

  Age Before Beauty (New York: Impetus Editions, 1991; London: Faber & Faber, 1991).

  The Anticlimaxes (New York: Impetus Editions, 1995; London: Faber & Faber, 1996). National Book Award, 1996.

  Aria di Giudecca (New York: Impetus Editions, 2000; London: Faber & Faber, 2000) [translated by Marialuisa Spaziani under the same title (Venice: Marsilio, 2002)].

  Mnemosyne (New York: Purcell & Stern, 2011; London: Faber & Faber, 2011; and 37 editions worldwide). National Book Award, 2011; Pulitzer Prize, 2012.

  The Complete Poems (New York: Impetus Editions/Purcell & Stern, 2014; London: Faber & Faber, 2014).

  Underwater Lightning: Uncollected Poems and Drafts, edited by Paul Dukach (New York and San Francisco: Purcell & Stern/Medusa, 2020; London: Faber & Faber/Medusa, 2020).

  Prescriptions and Projections: Prose Writings, edited by Eliot Weinberger (New York: Impetus Editions, 2021).

  SEE ALSO

  Elliott Blossom. Brownouts and Brilliants: The Instances of Ida Perkins (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016).

  Paul Dukach. Ida Perkins: Life and Art and Life (New York and San Francisco: Purcell & Stern/Medusa, 2019).

  Alan Glanville. Mnemosyne Remembers: The Life of Ida Perkins (New York: Impetus Editions, 2018).

  Hebe M. Horowitz. The Ida Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).

  Rosalind Horowitz. My Night with Arnold Outerbridge (and Other Tales from the Good Old Days) (New York: Boatwright Books, 2020).

  Acknowledgments

  The author gratefully salutes the following for help and encouragement of many sorts: Hans-Jürgen Balmes; Katherine Chen; Eric Chinski, Andrew Mandel, and my colleagues at Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Bill Clegg; Bob Gottlieb; Eliza Griswold; Margaret Halton; Michael Heyward; Leila Javitch; Jennifer Kurdyla; Laurence Laluyaux; Maureen McLane; David Miller; Darryl Pinckney; Justin Richardson; Stephen Rubin; Lorin Stein; and Roger Straus.

  Special thanks to Tenoch Esparza, for everything; to my wise agent, Melanie Jackson; and, above all, to Robin Desser, for her prodigious insight, enthusiasm, and, well, impetus.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jonathan Galassi is a lifelong veteran of the publishing world and the author of three collections of poetry, as well as translations of the Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. A former Guggenheim Fellow and poetry editor of The Paris Review, he also writes for The New York Review of Books and other publications. He lives in New York City.

  To view the reading group guide for Muse, please visit:

  http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/239494/muse/