Muse: A Novel Read online

  It wasn’t long before Ida was almost universally acclaimed as the distinctive poetic voice of her generation, though no one could have predicted the broad popularity she would later find. Yet in spite of the standoffishness for which she was often criticized, Paul perceived that Ida’s passions were accessible to everyone on paper from the very beginning—except in her “atonal” period in the early eighties, when she experimented (uncomfortably, most would say) with poetic abstraction. Nothing is hidden or remote in Ida Perkins; it’s all on the surface, in your face—the title of her epochal fourth book, which was quoted and imitated by Lowell, Duncan, Plath, and Gunn, among others. Lapidary—obsidian, even—the poems nevertheless embody human feeling with a directness that over time proved irresistible for hundreds of thousands of readers. Paul saw, too, that some of these poets’ most characteristic lines had been lifted from Ida. Think “Viciousness in the kitchen!” (though Ida was rarely known to cook a meal), or “savage servility,” or “The love of old men is not worth a lot,” or even “Life, friends, is boring.” Then think again. Yes, Ida was there first.

  But everyone—or almost everyone—stole from her. Paul discerned her influence in her snubbed suitor Delmore Schwartz, in the plangency of later Roethke, everywhere in Rukeyser, and in Elspeth Adams’s mid-period figured love lyrics—though nowhere, as we’ve seen (the silence is deafening), in Bishop. Ida was one of those rare poets who bridge the divide between aesthetic schools. The Beats and Objectivists looked to her every bit as much as the East Coast formalists. The fountainhead, the freewheeling, free-spirited Martha Graham of mid-century poetry, its Barefoot Contessa, with a dash of Dorothy Parkerish spice for good measure, she was ages ahead of everyone, and the living, breathing antidote to everything she’d come from. Like Botticelli’s Venus, she arrived out of nowhere on a half shell to bring up the rear of modernism. Quoting her is inevitable, somehow: Bringing Up the Rear was Ida’s arguably most influential collection, the one that finally brought her diva status—and reliable royalties.

  Thanks to Ida, too, poetry not infrequently found itself at the heart of American culture and society. Paul considered her encounter with Jacqueline Kennedy at the 1962 White House dinner for French culture minister and all-around culture hero André Malraux the stuff of myth. Malraux was seated on Jackie’s right, of course, but few were aware that Ida was on his right and that he spent virtually the entire evening in tête-à-tête conversation with her (Paul learned that she had been ably translated into French, practically from the beginning, by the critic René Schorr’s first wife, Renée, an intimate of Malraux’s). For most of the dinner, Jackie was left staring into space, pulling her Parker House roll to bits. Needless to say, Ida never darkened the White House door again during the Kennedys’ tragically brief reign—though she was later close to both Rosalynn and Nancy, to the surprise of many, and a kind of fairy godmother to Chelsea, who stayed with her twice in Venice, complete with Secret Service detail, during her father’s second term, when she needed a break from Monicagate.

  In the sixties, Ida progressed from literary superstar to celebrity, pure and simple. The transition had something to do, no doubt, with the simplifying and opening up of her work, which gradually lost its hard edge and became readable for everyone, while losing none of its depth and originality. (Could it have been due to the influence of Trey Turnbull? Paul wondered; or had her renown encouraged Ida to relax and clarify, though she was constitutionally incapable of dumbing down?) Her popularity also had to do, he could see, with her natural beauty, her penchant for risk-taking, and, above all, her well-known talent for love.

  There was grumbling among her jealous “peers,” of course—what else do poets do but complain about each other’s success, both critical and erotic? Who was it who said the reason there’s so much backbiting among poets is because there’s so little at stake? Ida had been the exception that proved the rule. By then, she’d moved into a region of fame that left virtually every other writer of any stripe in the dust. Forget The Hudson Review and Poetry. Now Time, Fortune, Ladies’ Home Journal, US News & World Report, Saturday Review, The New Yorker—even Reader’s Digest—were desperate to write about and interview and publish her. Her “What Becomes a Legend Most” Blackglama ad—lustrous sable over a brown tweed Chanel suit and oxfords—was a sensation. A vampish, guileless Meryl Streep with flaming red hair—that was Ida in her late thirties.

  Her occasional stealth appearances in New York and San Francisco in those years were widely reported on—and, as Paul discovered, occasionally invented. When Janis Joplin sang “Marginal Discharge” at Woodstock, Ida was reputedly sighted in the audience, though this may have been a desperate fan’s acid-stoked fantasy. Carly Simon and Carole King recorded a duet version of “Broken Man,” Ida’s sexiest, most unforgettable song, which went platinum in 1970 (that’s Ida shaking the tambourine in the background):

  Broken man,

  you’re just skin and bone,

  broken-down man,

  like I’m skin and bone.

  Broken man,

  why can’t I leave you alone?

  Take my heart

  and you torture me.

  Break my heart,

  I’m in misery.

  Broken man,

  will we ever be free?

  Paul, though, preferred the version on Turnbull’s Grammy-winning album The Ida Sessions, on which she recites a dozen of her best-loved lyrics, filigreed with Trey’s smoking riffs on tenor saxophone.

  In the seventies, during her short-lived flirtation with Maoism, when her work turned strident in the eyes of many, Ida was the only person ever to appear simultaneously on the covers of Rolling Stone, Tel Quel, and Interview. By then, though, she’d reunited with the leonine Outerbridge, now a virtual outcast as an unrepentant Stalinist, whom she’d met in London a decade earlier. Soon she more or less disappeared into the nimbus of A.O.’s Venetian silence (he’d long since stopped publishing). Ida kept writing, but her work, too, turned inward, though her crossover popularity with baby boomers had undeniable staying power over the next three decades. A new book would emerge every two or three years as if dropped from the heavens, and Sterling would gather it up and publish it at Impetus to general stupefaction and acclaim. Ida slowly became an off-site legend, a great hovering absent presence. Which only whetted the appetite of her fan base, who remained passionately loyal even as they themselves turned middle-aged.

  Paul knew it all, from Ida’s first tentative poems in the Chestnut Hill Herbivore, already pregnant with intimations of future significance, to the most exquisite Swiss plaquettes of the fifties and sixties, published in gilt-edged, snakeskin-bound editions of no more than twenty or thirty. While still in Hattersville he quietly became a—no, the—leading connoisseur of Perkinsiana; it was his secret hoard of adoration, the way model cars or baseball cards are for other kids. Paul let his classmates deify Magic Johnson and Kurt Cobain; his obsession with Ida Perkins made her his and his alone in a way no one who was flesh and blood ever could be. And he guarded his heroine jealously—though he couldn’t help crowing about some of his discoveries to Morgan, who was mind-boggled by his maniacal fixation on his one-and-only poet.

  “What did I start here? There are other writers, Paul,” she’d admonish him, rolling her eyes. “There’s Eliot, or Faulkner, or Stevens, or even the misunderstood Emily D. Hell, there’s even Arnold Outerbridge.”

  Paul would just shake his head. Every word of Ida’s was pure gold. No one else could come anywhere near her.

  Word slowly got out in scholarly circles that an oddball boy in Hattersville, New York, was the go- to guy about the elusive Ida, and over time Paul was inundated by bibliographical and biographical, even interpretive, queries from graduate students and eventually from established scholars of modernism. “What is all this strange mail you’re getting, Paul?” Grace Dukach would ask her son suspiciously, shrugging with incomprehension when he showed her the letters from English departments at Purdue
and Baylor and Yale.

  He’d even had a less-than-pleasant exchange with Elliott Blossom, critical poobah and self-styled kingmaker among contemporary poets. Blossom had written in The Covering Cherub that the “cyclamen stains” in “Attis,” the central text in Ida’s incendiary 1970 collection, Remove from the Right, referred to blood spilled in the Vietnam War. Paul, though, had pointed out, in a letter to the editor of the Cherub that has since become cherished academic lore, that the phrase occurs twice elsewhere in her work: in the little-known early poem “Verga,” of 1943, and in “Nice Weather,” an uncollected prose text from the late fifties, where it describes a pool of dried semen on her sleeping lover’s thigh (reputedly Harry Mathews’s). Blossom had withdrawn in high dudgeon and Paul understood that his chances for a university career had dwindled to almost nothing.

  Which was fine with him, because what he wanted, he’d come to understand, was to be involved with the writers of his own generation who were going to be Ida’s heirs, even if he couldn’t imagine being one of them himself. At Morgan’s urging, he’d gotten himself south to NYU (and NYC!) for college, where he unimaginatively majored in English, edited the literary magazine, and more or less lived in the Bobst Library on Washington Square. He landed a student job in the manuscript collection after classes and during summer vacations, and on his lunch breaks he haunted the Strand and the other used-book stores on Fourth Avenue, most of them soon to be killed off by the Internet.

  He’d also fallen under the spell of the rail-thin poet/critic Evan Halpern, whose view of Ida was more tempered than Paul’s, and who enjoyed winding him up about his obsession.

  “I’m afraid Ida Perkins doesn’t come within striking distance of Elspeth Adams, Paul,” Evan would attack, pitting Paul’s most beloved NYU teacher against his deepest admiration, and preparing for the barrage he knew would be forthcoming from his young disciple. “She has none of her finesse, none of her historical ballast.”

  “You’re just trying to get me riled,” Paul would volley back. “You know how I feel about Miss Adams. She’s the best teacher I’ll ever have”—he’d grin defiantly at Evan as he said this—“and an unforgettable poet. But she just doesn’t have Ida’s daring and reach and joie de vivre. She’s so careful and depressive … and … and closeted. She never has any fun—at least not on paper. She’s always the unloved lover, the loser, the waif. Ida is so up front and open about everything. And she knows how to enjoy herself, too.”

  “Precisely. No implication, no tragic subtext. She’s a flat, declarative open book, always engaged and engorged. She’s a monotone ecstatic bore.”

  Paul secretly enjoyed the way his teacher teased him about his attachment, but he was nowhere near ready to admit to anyone, least of all to Evan, that Ida was less than perfection. He was far too invested in his investment to submit it to any kind of test. He did, however, take Evan’s advice and write his undergraduate thesis on someone else: he’d chosen Arnold Outerbridge, concentrating on the influence of his postwar work on Ida.

  At NYU Paul had also slowly, painfully, begun to accept that he liked boys better than girls, and had lived through a series of infatuations that brought him moments of intense joy but more often a misery he experienced as a low-grade fever he couldn’t kick. Ted Curtis, a fellow student in Evan’s symbolist poetry class, had been Paul’s first serious crush. A taciturn blond from Reading, Pennsylvania, Ted was certifiably heterosexual yet desperately in need of positive reinforcement. Paul’s not truly returned yet never fully rejected attraction consumed them both through college, until Ted went off to law school at Berkeley and they lost touch.

  Love in the flesh remained elusive. It drew yet frightened him. This was the late eighties, after all, the most terrifying days of the plague. Surrounded everywhere by insolent youth and beauty, Paul looked and lusted but didn’t dare touch.

  As graduation neared, he became more and more worried about what he was going to do with his life. Terror gripped him that he’d have to go back to his family in Hattersville, a living death. After a series of panicked consultations with Morgan, he decided he’d give publishing a try, since it had to do with books and writers, the only things he’d ever cared about. Morgan, who, Paul had come to understand, was one of the most respected booksellers in the country, arranged an interview with her friend Homer Stern, the premier literary publisher of his generation, as she described him to Paul. “He’s an outrageous cad,” she told him, with a knowing glint in her eye. “But he’ll teach you more about publishing in one day than you’ll ever learn anywhere else.”

  Homer had been all bluster and grand gesture when Paul paid him a visit, but, alas, he had no openings. It happened, though, that he knew about a position in the rights department at Howland, Wolff, and before long Paul found himself a member of the workforce, pulling down $300 a week and as many free books as he could haul home to his rabbit hutch of a studio in Chelsea.

  His generally sunny demeanor, largely adopted in imitation of Morgan, which he managed to project even when he didn’t feel sunny, along with his judgment, which turned out to be usually sound thanks to Evan’s training and his voluminous reading, earned him Dan Wolff’s and Larry Friedman’s confidence, and after a couple of years he’d been elevated to junior editor at HW. But P & S remained his ideal.

  True, they had legendarily disgusting quarters on Union Square, the city’s major needle park, and rock-bottom wages; but the quasi-religious fealty Homer inspired in his crew was a siren call to Paul. That and the authors! Not just scary Pepita Erskine, perfectionist Iain Spofford, and hypercool Thor Foxx, but the haunting young E. C. Benton, who’d sprung like Athena from the mountains of Carolina; or Grenada Brooks, the hope of Caribbean literature; or Dmitry Chavchavadze, the larger-than-life Georgian poet; and Australian Padraic Snell; and St. John Vezey, South Africa’s national bard, and … and … and … The list was practically endless. There was something about its homemade, familial—or was it paternalistic?—feeling for writers that made the shabby-chic firm fatally appealing to Paul. Each of their books was a sacred object. Paul was in love with Caroline Koblenz’s elegant jackets and typography that paid subtle homage to the work of W. A. Dwiggins, the genius behind Knopf’s magisterial bindings and settings, which had long ago set a never-to-be-equaled standard in book design. He loved the heft of the books in his hand. He loved the colors of their bindings. He loved how they smelled.

  A few years later, after he had worked with a number of presentable if far from immortal novelists and journalists at HW, there had at last been an opening in Homer’s editorial department and, with yet another assist from Morgan, Paul had been able to make the leap. Homer took him out for a ceremonial lunch at his daily watering hole, the Soft-shell Crab, where they each downed a shot of vodka followed by the Crab’s popular wasabi tuna burgers. Paul reported for work two weeks later.

  III

  Home at Last

  Paul had felt at home the moment he’d walked into the boxed-in, ill-lit P & S lobby. The place looked more like his idea of the offices of a porn magazine (there seemed to be one upstairs, down the hall from the rehab center on the eighth floor) than a temple of contemporary literature. A broken couch and frosted glass dividers fought for attention with certificates for the National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and National Book Critics Circle Awards won by house authors appended helter-skelter over the receptionist’s rickety desk alongside less prepossessing announcements, like the American Book Designers Federation 1969 honorable mention for typography. P & S specialized in Nobel Prizes, in fact, but there were no plaques for them, just the gold medals that Paul had noticed on Homer’s desk during their interviews. Later that morning, he was given a cubicle on the south side of the hallway (Homer had called it “a nice office with a window” at lunch), equipped with a boxy Korean computer console and a telephone, both of which appeared to be in working order.

  Manuscripts from literary agents would show up in neat gray or powder-blue boxes on his
pockmarked old school desk, or in battered manila envelopes if they were coming from writers without representation, and he’d read through them with the requisite show-me detachment. In 90 percent of cases, you could tell within a page or two whether the writer could write. Ninety percent of the time, box or no box, he or she could not. Every so often, though, the words would cohere, the sentences would follow one on another with lockstep plausibility, and Paul would begin to feel an unsettling combination of elation and fear—elation at the linguistic and psychological aptness of what he was reading, and fear, as he went on, that this undeniably gifted writer would veer off and spoil her creation before he could finish the stack of pages.

  When, miraculously, the work was actually fine, Paul would run into Homer’s office half crazed with excitement, shouting, “We have to do this!” Which, remarkably enough in Paul’s experience, was music to Homer’s ears. “Go, go, go, baby!” he’d shout back, as if cheering on a two-year-old at the track. Paul would hondle, as Homer put it, with the writer’s agent over the advance—usually no more than $25,000 or $30,000 in those days—and often enough, mirabile dictu, the manuscript, and its author, would be theirs to coax and hover over and massage into a living, breathing printed and bound novel or book of stories or poems or essays or work of reportage that could be trumpeted to booksellers and reviewers and that increasingly endangered species, the retail book buyer, as something not to be missed.