Muse: A Novel Page 5

  “Publishing would be so wonderful without those wretched authors,” one of Homer’s disenchanted colleagues once complained. Not for Paul. He floated on a sea of entrancement, pistol-whipped by the vagaries of his writers’ oversize neediness and self-absorption yet buoyed by the rewards of helping their work see the light of day. He, who was so beset by doubt—about his own talents, his eligibility for love, his capacity for happiness—never for a minute questioned the value of what he was doing. He was made for it, and he knew it. So he kept his head down, at one with his work, while his life flew by.

  IV

  The World of Sterling Wainwright

  Paul met Sterling Wainwright, who at seventy-eight was beginning to bend more than a bit, at an Impetus New Poets reading at the New School seven or eight years into his tenure at P & S, in the fall of 2005. With his ubiquitous pipe and slightly threadbare gentility, Sterling exuded a patrician ease and impersonal openness that the younger man found enthralling, if a bit intimidating.

  “Come and see me,” Sterling had offered, but Paul, who was shy with people he looked up to, had been slow to respond. When he’d mustered the gumption to call, they’d met at the Cornelia Street Café one afternoon for iced tea, and then repaired to Sterling’s apartment on Barrow Street for something stronger. They’d talked shop for hours: poetry, translators, the history of Impetus, and endless other topics, and Paul had emerged fascinated with Sterling himself—so offhand, so experienced, such a humble brag, as Paul called people who affected modesty, all the while letting you know just how accomplished they were.

  And Sterling seemed to take an interest in Paul, too, gratified that someone from the younger generation knew enough to appreciate what he and his crowd had been up to in their salad days. Sterling had a need to testify, to transmit his lore and wisdom, and he professed to be stunned by the depth of Paul’s knowledge of Ida and her work. He gave the impression that he’d found in Paul the faithful receiver and disciple he’d been waiting for.

  Sterling suggested that he and Paul keep talking, so every couple of weeks Paul showed up for another round of stories about Outerbridge, Ida, and the rest of Sterling’s writers, so different from Homer’s, yet equally impressive in their rarefied concentration on the most experimental practitioners of modernism. Slowly, a camaraderie developed. Paul, whose capacity for hero worship was bottomless, became attached to the older man. Sterling could feel it, Paul was sure, and basked in his young friend’s admiration. The fact that Paul worked for one of Sterling’s professional foes only seemed to increase his appeal in Sterling’s eyes.

  The antipathy between Homer and Sterling was toxic. Paul was used to Homer’s talking Sterling and Impetus down, having heard about their author-related dustups over the years. They were still fighting, even now, over who should publish Giovanni Di Lorenzo’s letters. Paul had turned down Di Lorenzo’s weak later poems and stories and Di Lorenzo had taken them to Impetus, but his widow had recently collared Homer at a party and implored him to publish Giovanni’s literary remains. Homer, who could be a surprisingly soft touch where wives and daughters were concerned, felt a sentimental obligation to do so, bolstered no doubt by Sterling’s involvement. They had sparred over early Targoff, too, and mid-period Roden. Paul, though, always felt Ida was humming somewhere in the background.

  When Paul let it drop that he’d met Sterling, Homer had been grandly condescending.

  “I hadn’t realized he was still working. Not that he ever did.” Homer tapped his hand languidly over his mouth in imitation of a yawn. “Sterling Wainwright is a dollar-a-year man if I’ve ever seen one.”

  “Impetus seems to be going strong, better than ever,” Paul countered mildly.

  “Name their last best seller. I hear Wainwright spends all his time upstate. God, I wish he’d roll over so I could put my hand on Ida Perkins’s thigh.” Homer’s yawn exploded into a guffaw.

  Paul got reciprocal static from Sterling.

  “How’s Homer?” he’d ask Paul whenever they got together, his question anything but innocent. For Sterling, Homer epitomized everything that had gone wrong with publishing in the course of his career: loud, unlettered Homer was a merchandiser pure and simple, endlessly dumping worthless tripe on the market, like the rest of the big boys, to the detriment of Literature. He cut corners, lured away authors (from Sterling in particular) with promises he had no intention of keeping, and was disrespectful of Sterling’s sacrosanct authorial relationships, not to mention his vital contribution to the art of his time.

  Worst of all, “I hear your boss has been sending importuning letters to Ida again,” Sterling would erupt, without a shred of evidence, as Paul would discover when he pushed for it. “Does he have any decency? Doesn’t he understand how embarrassing it is for Ida, having to turn him down year after year? Can’t you do something about it, Paul?”

  Sterling’s misreading of Homer amused Paul, but it made him nervous, too. After all, he adored his wisecracking boss and the ramshackle enterprise he’d built, which was far more capable and dedicated to serious writing than Sterling would ever admit (the fact that he was so perennially exercised about Homer told Paul just how good Sterling knew Homer was). Besides, Homer paid Paul an unhandsome but more or less living wage, something Sterling could never have dreamed of doing.

  Still, Paul couldn’t quite believe how much Sterling had seen and done in his long and eccentric life in letters. Unlike Homer, who was essentially an organization man, however idiosyncratic, and whose first commitment was to the institution he’d so carefully created and nursed, what mattered most to Sterling was writing itself. He was a walking encyclopedia of authorial genius and malfeasance, too: the ineffable charm and unreliability of Andrei Abramovich; Marina Dello Gioio’s scandalous penchant for younger men; how that so-and-so So-and-So had made it impossible for him to publish Faulkner; why his Aunt Lobelia, who’d been his major benefactor early in his career, hadn’t let him publish Lolita. Every publisher Paul knew had a story about why someone else had prevented him from taking on the risky masterpiece that had turned out not to be risky at all. But Paul had learned over time that most publishers were haunted by the Ones That Got Away—usually thanks to their own blindness or chintziness or lack of nerve. They seemed to matter more than the ones they’d managed to snare.

  As he unwound his thread during their evenings together, Sterling told Paul how he’d become a publisher at the behest of Arnold Outerbridge, when Sterling, an impetuous nineteen-year-old rich kid from Cincinnati, had decamped from the stultifying country club that was Princeton in the fall of 1946 and gone to sit at Outerbridge’s feet in war-ravaged London.

  Steeped in the lore and poetry of classicism, A.O. had himself been bent as a young man on remaking stolid Edwardian literature into something with the chastity of his essential Greeks. The amazing thing was that he’d done it—he and his older friends and enemies Pound, Eliot, H.D., Moore, Lawrence, and all the others. What came to be known as modernism had remade literature and the other arts once and for all. Where before you might have written, “My love is like a red, red rose” and more or less gotten away with it, suddenly there was serious talk about

  scalloped

  petals sacrificed on

  granite

  (Paul looked on in amazement as Sterling threw his head back and recited Hoda Avery’s “Scimitar,” one of her early lyrics in her chastest imagist vein, from memory.)

  Outerbridge in London, like Pound in Rapallo, had pulled the strings of his younger puppets in Oxford, New York, and San Francisco, and Sterling was among his willing captives. A.O., as Sterling needlessly reminded Paul, had been born in Nome in 1905, the son of a trapper and an Inuit woman. Somehow he got himself to Harvard, its first Alaskan student, but left after two semesters, in the spring of 1923, arguing, perhaps correctly, that the old Bostonian professorate had nothing to teach him. Instead he lit out, not for New York but London, earning his way across the Atlantic on a freighter, finding odd jobs in th
e metropolitan printing business, and, unbelievably, working his way deep into the beehive of English literary culture over the next decade. Ottoline Morrell took a shine to him, though Virginia Woolf found him “dull, bumptious” and T. S. Eliot studiously ignored him—until the brute force of Outerbridge’s talent compelled Old Possum to acknowledge that another American was making waves in London. Pound and Eliot, older by a generation, quailed when Arnold started haranguing no one in particular about the poetic “booboisie”—a term of opprobrium stolen from his antagonist and model H. L. Mencken. Brother Arnold, as he had the temerity to call himself, lifted more than a little from Uncle Ez, though Pound affected not to notice. But on top of A.O.’s literary prowess was political commitment as well, for, like Pound, Arnold became a True Believer, though in a very different church.

  When the crash came, Arnold stayed put in London, where he fell under the spell of English Communism. He went to the Spanish Civil War with John Cornford, whom he had taught during a brief stint as a master at Stowe, and was by his side when Cornford died near Córdoba the day after his twenty-first birthday, at the end of 1936. Hesperus (1938), A.O.’s heroic elegy for his young comrade, won him fame across the political spectrum. Suddenly, the Left had an unimpeachable literary voice, less sniffily narcissistic than Auden, more expressive and more reliably doctrinaire than Dos Passos.

  The brash, contentious American had become a force to contend with in London, widely viewed as the Shelley of his age. His brief affair with Decca Mitford before her marriage to Esmond Romilly was followed by a string of conquests, most of them among the Red Debutantes of Berkeley Square. In September 1940, he married Lady Annabel Grosvenor, estranged youngest daughter of the second Duke of Westminster. Their daughter, Svetlana, was born six months later.

  Outerbridge had served with courage and distinction under Montgomery in North Africa during World War II, receiving the Victoria Cross, awarded for “most conspicuous bravery or extreme devotion to duty” for his ferocity at El Alamein. His poem about Stalingrad, Elegy for Evgenia (Heinemann, 1946)—he and Lady Annabel had divorced quietly in 1944—became the poetic rallying cry for worldwide Communism after the war, quoted approvingly by Stalin, translated into thirty-two languages (including into Russian by the up-and-coming Yurii Khodakovsky). Sterling nonchalantly pulled the 1948 American edition off a shelf and handed it to Paul.

  Awarded an honorary Red Star in 1947, A.O. was at the peak of his powers. Even the archconservative Eliot wrote (privately) that he’d been moved to tears by A.O.’s epic The Fight (1948; Impetus, 1949), known as the Aeneid of international Communism, a twenty-thousand-line narrative of Russia’s devastating war the likes of which had not been seen since the days of Victor Hugo. Arnold’s autobiography, South from Nome (1950), was likewise an international succès fou (and for decades Sterling’s best-selling book. The Book-of-the-Month Club alone sold 88,000 copies the year it was published).

  The Cold War, though, had been hard on A.O. From the left, the crowd around The Protagonist attacked his politics as retrograde and myopic, while Joe McCarthy went after him from the right. Sterling was valiant in presenting and defending Outerbridge’s later work—admittedly not as strong as his heroic period—but A.O. quickly fell out of fashion in the frightened Cold War West of Eisenhower and Eden.

  By the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, which A.O. publicly deplored, his career in the States—and in Britain, too—was effectively over. Even in Russia, where he had been made an honorary citizen, the post-Stalinist thaw meant that Outerbridge’s work went into decline under Khrushchev, and the invitations, awards, and emoluments dried up. For a while, Arnold wandered. Always writing, always it seemed with a new woman, he lived for several years on Minorca, almost within swimming distance of his old antagonist Robert Graves, and later in a remote village on the Greek island of Paros, with Svetlana, now married to a British banker, and their three boys in occasional attendance.

  A.O. spent his declining years in Venice, holed up in the apartment overlooking his old flame Celine Mannheim’s garden. It was there, in the fall of 1969, that he encountered Ida Perkins again (they’d had a brief affair in London in the late fifties), at a dinner for none other than Homer Stern, who was visiting his cousin. Soon Arnold and Ida were living together, and she was to care for him devotedly for the next twenty years, till he died of emphysema on October 25, 1989, at the age of eighty-four.

  Sterling admitted that when he’d first come to Outerbridge in London for advice, Arnold had not been encouraging about the young Princetonian’s forays into verse. “You’ll never make it as a poet, Sterl,” he’d drawled. “Go home and do something useful—like starting a publishing house. We need you.” Crestfallen, then inspired, Sterling had spent a few months skiing and canoodling in Gstaad before wending his way home on the Queen Mary. Less than two years later, Impetus Editions, set up in the old farmer’s cottage on his aunt Lobelia Delano’s estate in Hiram’s Corners, New York, a hundred miles north of the city, was a going concern.

  “Impotent Editions,” Outerbridge called it when he was annoyed with Sterling, which turned out to be often over the next forty years. He hadn’t conceived that Sterling, beyond being loyal and well-heeled, might actually have a mind and sensibility of his own. But Impetus soon became anything but a rich man’s plaything. Sterling had been tight with a dollar, he acknowledged, but liberal in his encouragement of writing that he thought mattered and the writers who created it, and over not too many years, his fledgling house had developed from a congeries of Outerbridge acolytes into a small, selective organ of the left-leaning branch of late modernism (as opposed to the by-then-incarcerated Pound’s and the apotheosized Eliot’s rightward-tilting brand) that came to be known as the Movement.

  Paul was convinced that no one had done more to ensure the health of what became a vital alternative strain in American literature than Sterling Wainwright in his heyday. After all, Byron Hummock, the showiest of the trendsetting postwar Jewish American writers, had published his first book of stories with Sterling, as had April Owens her now-classic anti-O’Neillian dramas of modern Greek love and politics, and Jorge Metzl his groundbreaking journalism about West Africa. Sterling’s Impetus New Poets also introduced and stayed loyal to most of the second- and third-generation modernists. Only Pound and his disciple Laughlin, with his comparatively staid Nude Erections, as Pound had dubbed it, established a decade earlier not thirty miles east in Connecticut’s Northwest Corner, could hold a candle to the impetus that Outerbridge and Wainwright together had given to the Movement Moment.

  And Sterling had evolved, too. From being a gawky, sex-obsessed, very tall rich young man, he grew into a debonair, eligible, sex-obsessed bachelor-about-town. Yes, he was something of a wastrel, along with his youthful buddy from Cincinnati Johnnie George, heir to the Skoobie Doo peanut butter fortune, who enjoyed nothing more than swanning around with Sterling and a couple of starlets for evenings on the town in New York, ski vacations in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or trouble in Tahiti. One winter Sterling and Georgie had spent two months in the Hole, as they called it, and came away owning the ski resort at the Summit for their pains. The Summit boasted the finest powder Sterling had skied on since his student days in Switzerland, and some mighty attractive women, too. Paul had seen a picture of him making an elegant turn on a slope somewhere, a nimble industrial princeling as handsome as a matinee idol. No wonder dashing, tall, blond, rich Sterling had wowed local cattle heiress and landowner Jeannette Stevens and promptly gotten her pregnant. Jeannette was lovely and forthright in the Western way, but not all that challenging, Sterling admitted, and after giving him a daughter, she had gone back to Wyoming, baby in tow, while Sterling stayed in the East, carousing and reading and picking up writers in minuscule deals that had added up over time to a list of influence and importance, if not overwhelming salability.

  By his fifties, when America was still licking its wounds over its debacle in Southeast Asia and being torn apart by the
revolution in values it unleashed, the onetime playboy had evolved, Paul saw, into a literary grandee and guru, a kind of minor saint of the counterculture as the publisher and protector of his most popular author, the iconic Ida Perkins.

  Sterling, as Paul didn’t need reminding, had known Ida his whole life; she was his cousin, after all. Doris Appleton, the much younger half-sister of his grandmother Ida Appleton Wainwright (the Appletons hailed originally from Salem, Massachusetts, and claimed two or three witches in their lineage), had married George Peabody (“Pebo”) Perkins, a stiff, Episcopalian Proper Bostonian if there ever was one, as a mere girl of eighteen in 1919; Ida’s father was a hopelessly ineffectual banker who lost everything in the Crash and turned into a nasty drunk. As if that weren’t enough, Pebo’s brother Thomas Handyside Perkins, known as Handy, married a cousin of Sterling’s mother, Lavinia Furness, so they were doubly if not exactly closely related. So Sterling and Ida were glancingly aware of each other from family gatherings throughout their childhoods, though she barely acknowledged her younger cousin’s existence.

  It had been at the Wainwright family’s elaborate “camp” at Otter Creek on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1943, the summer Sterling turned sixteen, that he’d first come alive to his older cousin’s beauty. And Ida had been equally smitten with Sterling, a golf club–wielding Adonis who’d already begun turning heads, as he would all his life—Paul had heard the stories.