Muse: A Novel Read online

  Paul could tell who Homer’s old flames had been by how courtly he was with them, loyal in a way he was with no one else—not authors, relations, or even his best foreign confederates. Sex with Homer seemed to lead to friendship, perhaps the most unambivalent relationships he had. He was a ladies’ man, and not just in the accepted sense of the term. Women seemed to offer him a solace that was missing from his noisy yet inarticulate sparring with men.

  It was impossible for Homer to be really close to another male; his Neanderthal instinct was too strong. He boasted about his affection for his authors, the Three Aces in particular, but when Paul joined them for lunch, as he was always invited to because Homer, he sensed, was uncomfortable one-on-one, the conversation often ended up being superficial, if not inane—a terrible waste when three of the leading writers in the world were sitting at the table. Homer, for all his impact, was a man of a few words, many of them unprintable, which got repeated over and over in ingenious combinations. “And so forth and so on” was how his stories tended to trail off, with a dismissive wave. “Let’s go make a book” was how he brought lunch to a close.

  What Homer thrived on most was having enemies. Nothing gave him more pleasure than cutting dead a former employee—a “deserter,” hence a nonperson—or providing a denigrating comment about a competitor to The Daily Blade. In his days doing army PR he’d learned that it didn’t matter what you said as long as you were quoted. He had a series of rubber stamps for unwelcome correspondence, which he’d return with GREAT MOMENTS IN LITERATURE, HORSESHIT PIE, or best of all FUCK YOU VERY MUCH smudged in big black letters across the pages. He delighted in accusing Sandy Isenberg, the pint-sized president of Owl House, of boorishness, making bellicose public sallies that left Sandy, a short man unaccustomed to opposition of any kind, sputtering with rage.

  Best of all, though, was fighting with agents, those parasites who interfered with his private relations with his property—i.e., his authors. Paul, who felt it was advisable to get along with people if possible because you might want or need to do business with them in the future, now and again suggested it might be politic to reestablish relations with Agent X, who had incurred Homer’s ire years ago by selling a book he’d wanted to Farrar, Straus or Knopf.

  “Don’t give me that Christian forgiveness bullshit, Dukach. I’m a vindictive Jew!” he’d bellow. “End of joke!”—another classic Homer Stern way of closing a conversation.

  One agent who loomed in his imagination was Angus McTaggart, with whom Homer enjoyed a long-standing sadomasochistic bromance. McTaggart, who professed to adore Homer, adored working his way through Homer’s catalog even more, signing up his unrepresented or badly represented writers and then demanding oversize improvements in their compensation for their next books, which Homer delighted in being outraged about. Most of the writers ended up staying, on terms that made publishing them unprofitable for Homer, but some of the bigger ones did occasionally leave for greener pastures, like Abe Burack, after he finally hit it big with his big Brooklyn novel, A Patch on Bernie. Homer would thunder and swear and refuse to take Angus’s calls for a few weeks or months. Then Angus would take him out to lunch, grovel apologetically, and pick up the check, an unheard-of deviation from the publisher-agent quadrille, and the cycle would start up again. But unlike the Nympho, another powerful agent who couldn’t help taking Homer’s acting-out personally (to be fair, there was a misogynist cast to many of his jabs), Angus reveled in the ritualized combat that was a way of averting boredom for both of them.

  Homer loved winning, and loved seeing others lose even more. But he also enjoyed the game for its own sake. And he was extraordinarily good at it. He had created a highly articulated organism and employed the diversionary color of his personality effectively in its service—unless he got carried away, as he quite often did, by his emotions. His employees felt to him like his “illegitimate children”; they were the best in the business because they were his. He was no intellectual and didn’t pretend to be, though he read, or “sniffed,” as he put it, all the books he published. He was an amateur, in the original sense of the word: he loved writing and writers. And he was unmatched at the one thing that mattered to them more than anything—even money: he could get them talked about.

  Now, having more or less recovered from his agon with the notebooks, Paul mentioned to Homer and Sally that he was rereading Pepita’s demolishing essay on Outerbridge in Retrospective Transgressions, her scathing study of postwar Communist intellectuals. Pepita had become the darling of The Protagonist, the anti-Stalinist left-wing review, early in her career, when they’d published “Jiving with Joe,” her exposé of the totalitarian principles that underlay Movement aesthetics, which had put her on the map as the nerviest cultural critic of her generation.

  “I met Outerbridge in Venice,” Homer was saying, re-hearsing the story Paul had heard time and again. “Celine was his landlady. I was there the night he saw Ida again, ten years after their first affair. He was sitting on the Marino Marini in the courtyard—with the cock detached, naturally—drunk as usual. But still a good-looking man in his sixties—not quite an alter kocker. Too bad nobody reads him anymore.” Homer’s evil grin was a wonder to behold.

  “I wouldn’t quite say that, Homer,” Paul demurred. “But what about Ida? Did you try to get her to come to us? Not just then but—”

  “Is the pope Catholic?” Homer interrupted. “What self-respecting publisher wouldn’t—though most of these pischikers can’t tell their ass from their elbow. But Ida has always been loyal to Wainwright—though she did promise that if she ever made a change, she’d come to me.”

  Paul had heard that before; it was the oldest line in the business. But a man can dream, can’t he? And this was one dream he and Homer shared. Having Ida at P & S would be an enormous coup for them both. He wondered if it could ever happen. He shouldn’t even be thinking about it; the mere thought was disloyal to Sterling. But he was a publisher, wasn’t he?

  A few days later, as if on the spur of the moment, he put in a call to Ida’s agent, Roz Horowitz, a canny old bird who he felt had always had a soft spot for him, and asked her to lunch.

  “So tell me about Ida Perkins, Roz. What’s the news?” Paul asked, as they sipped their white wine at Bruno’s, the overpriced midtown watering hole favored by the big publishers before they made their mass exodus to lower Manhattan in the mid- to late teens. On this particular afternoon Knopf’s editorial whiz Jas Busbee, one of the banes of Paul’s existence, was having lunch with the Nympho in one corner, while in the back of the room Angus McTaggart was leaning over the table whispering conspiratorially to his new client, Orin Roden, no doubt plotting about how to move him from P & S to Owl House or somewhere with even bigger pockets (as would soon happen), waving to Paul all the while. “You know she’s always been my favorite poet.”

  “Get in line, dollink.” Roz was a diminutive butterball of a woman whose legs didn’t quite reach the floor when she was sitting in her chair. She had several chins and a large pile of hennaed hair pinned on top of her head, oversize sunglasses, and wore bright red lipstick. “That and a nickel will buy you exactly nothing. Ida Perkins is everybody’s favorite poet, and you know it.”

  “Well, not quite everyone’s. I never understood why she and Elspeth Adams were so standoffish.”

  “You didn’t? I thought you said you knew poets. They have their cliques and their claques, their jealousies and their sworn enmities, like all artists. If you go for Stravinsky you’re not going to be too popular with Schoenberg. Take that bastard Hummock. He’s always talking down his so-called friend Roden over there. It’s human nature.”

  “I suppose you’re right. Sometimes I think it’s visceral, biological even. As if they can’t stand each other’s smell.”

  “Watch it, kiddo. Ida Perkins doesn’t smell. She’s as pure as a rose.”

  “I know she’s perfect, Roz. And not only because she’s your client. I yield to no one in my admiration of I
da Perkins. But a rose does have a wonderful, rich odor—and thorns, too, the last time I checked. I bet even the perfect Ida Perkins has had her … dissatisfactions over the years. How happy is she with her publisher?”

  Roz gave Paul an even stare. “You know very well she’s been with your new best buddy Sterling Wainwright more or less her whole life.”

  “Yes, of course. I wouldn’t dream of interfering with a blissful relationship. I was just curious about how it’s gone. From her perspective.”

  “The usual ups and downs. But I’m not sure I can imagine Ida anywhere else.”

  “Of course not.” Paul retreated to his previous line of questioning. “Have you ever discussed Ms. Perkins’s work with your sister?”

  “Aren’t we curious today. Hebe and I don’t talk business. We’ve got enough to contend with dealing with our aged parents—and each other. I know she thinks the world of Ida, though; everyone with any taste does. I wouldn’t be surprised if she wrote a book about her someday. I don’t think she’s so sure about Elizabeth Adams.”

  “Elspeth.”

  “If you say so. How pretentious can you get,” Roz muttered under her breath before ordering herself another glass.

  “Blame her parents if you must. I think it’s a beautiful name myself. But getting back to Ms. Perkins—she hasn’t published for quite a few years now. How is her health?”

  “Fine, as far as I know. To tell you the truth, we’re not in daily contact. You’re aware she lives in Venice. And she’s not on e-mail.”

  “Yes. I’ve been talking to Sterling about her and Arnold Outerbridge, working on these strange notebooks he left behind. They’re written in a kind of code. I’d be interested in finding out what Ms. Perkins knows about them.”

  “Arnold Outerbridge! Did I ever tell you about my night with Arnold Outerbridge? What a shit! But that’s a story for another time. What were you saying about these notebooks? Are you going to publish them?”

  “That would be up to Sterling,” Paul answered in his most self-effacing vein. “Right now we’re simply trying to figure out what they add up to—if anything.” Sterling and Paul had pored over Paul’s transcription before he’d left Hiram’s Corners, but Sterling hadn’t had any better idea than Paul what was going on in them.

  Roz sipped her wine and assessed Paul silently. At last she said, “Listen—I have an idea. Why don’t you go pay Ida a visit after Frankfurt? I’ll arrange it.”

  “Do you think she’d see me? That would be fantastic, Roz! I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Just remember you can’t talk poetry with her. She detests literary types. And suck-ups.”

  “Roz! I promise I won’t forget.”

  “Don’t. Because if you start going la-di-da on her, you’re toast.”

  “I give you my word.”

  They finished their double decaf espressos and Paul paid for their lunch (two salades niçoises and Roz’s three glasses of Falanghina to his one), planted a noisy kiss on each cheek, and put her into a taxi. He rode the bus down Fifth Avenue to give himself time to daydream a little. He couldn’t keep from fantasizing about what it would be like to be in Ida’s presence, to actually hear her speak. He was half afraid that when she did open her mouth, he’d be so overwhelmed that what she said would go in one ear and out the other and he’d come away with nothing but the memory of his own fascination.

  Yes, he had an ulterior motive in making his visit, he admitted to himself as the bus crawled through the afternoon traffic past the Empire State Building, into the seedier stretches of the Garment District and Koreatown, and on past the Flatiron Building. And Roz was well aware of it; she was setting it up, wasn’t she? What he really wanted, though, was simply to be in Ida’s presence, to see how she moved, to hear the sound of her voice. Whatever happened beyond that, if anything, would be gravy.

  The bus lurched to a halt at Fourteenth Street, and he made his escape. He was going to see Ida Perkins in Venice. Unaccountably, he was convinced this visit would change his life. First though, he had to get through Frankfurt.

  VIII

  The Fair

  The modern-day Frankfurt Book Fair was a postwar phenomenon, a vehicle for easing the readmission of Germany into the company of civilized Western societies. Originally, it had been a phenomenon of the Renaissance, Frankfurt being the largest trading center near Mainz, where Johannes Gutenberg and his fellows had invented movable type in the late 1430s. The fair had been established again in 1949 and had grown into the most important annual gathering in international publishing. Every October, tens of thousands of publishers from all over the world scurried like so many ants among the warehouse-like halls of the fair’s bleak campus on the edge of the city center, rushing to appointments with their counterparts.

  But books weren’t sold at the modern-day Frankfurt. Authors were—by the pound and sometimes by the gross. What the publishers did at Frankfurt was hump the right to sell their writers’ work in other territories and languages, often pocketing a substantial portion of the earnings for themselves (the ever-paternalistic French were among the most egregious, raking off 50 percent of the take). The days before agents woke up to the potential of international deals were a wild and woolly era, though the seigneurial rituals of fair commerce were punctiliously observed by the players. Rights directors were the most visible players under the Frankfurt bell jar, and the acknowledged queen of them all was Cora Blamesly, FSG’s mace-wielding Iron Maiden, who hailed from the arbor-draped hills of Carinthia and was a past master at brandishing her picked-up Sloane Ranger accent, with its ineradicable Germanic undertone, and her S/M selling techniques to extract outrageous contracts from her desperate European “friends.”

  Cora and her ilk would hold back important manuscripts for sale at the fair and then “slip” them with elaborate fanfare to favored editors in various territories, demanding that they be read overnight and soliciting preemptive offers, often inflated by the expectations and tensions of Frankfurt’s carnival atmosphere.

  The Europeans were desperate because the postwar cultural economy had dictated that Italian and German, Japanese and Brazilian, and sometimes even French readers needed and wanted to read American books. Not just the big commercial authors, either, the Stephen Kings and Danielle Steels, but the Serious Literary Writers, too. First there’d been the anxiety-ridden, attitude-infused Jewish American novelists; followed by the less interesting, more self-regarding WASPs, the Updikes and Styrons and Foxxes; and the nondescript newbies, the young Turks full of sass and plausibility that Cora and her counterparts whipped up into supernovas for the four days of the fair, sometimes for book after book, year after year. European publishing nabobs like Jorge Vilas (Spain), Norberto Beltraffio (Italy), Matthias Schoenborn (Germany), and the biggest overspender of them all, Danny van Gennep from Utrecht, had been playing this way for years, and were on the hook to Cora for literal millions. When Roger Straus or Lucy Morello brought a new author to Frankfurt, they all jumped, as they did for Rob Routman, the head-turning editor in chief of Owl House—sometimes, it was rumored, without reading all that much (or, let’s be honest, any) of the manuscript—because often, or often enough anyway, the books “worked,” i.e., sold copies back home. Many publishers played “Ready, Fire, Aim” buying foreign books, acquiring titles that sounded hot but often, when the commissioned translations materialized months later, would have them shaking their heads, wondering how such a dog could have appeared so leonine in the half-light of the smoke-infested Hessischer Hof bar, still packed at two a.m. with drunken, libidinous editors and rights people splayed across each other on the sagging couches.

  The serial drink dates and langweilisch alcoholic dinners with self-congratulatory speeches by the hosting German publishers, followed by more drinks on into the night (same-time-next-year cohabitation was not unheard of, either) contributed to Frankfurt’s nonstop bonhomie and its open-walleted frenzy. As one grand old man of Danish publishing had told Homer, “We come to F
rankfurt every year to see if we’re still alive.” Some, alas, were not. The worst were former bigwigs who had the bad taste to reappear, wandering the cavernous halls, buttonholing former colleagues between nonexistent appointments. They were ghosts, revenants, and everyone knew it—including them, perhaps.

  Frankfurt was anything but social; it was carnivorousness at its most rapacious, with a genteel European veneer. The dressy clothes, the parties, the cigars, the jacked-up prices in the hotels and restaurants, the disappointing food were all of a piece. It was exhausting and repetitive and depressing—and no one in publishing with any sense or style would have missed it for the world.

  Homer was made for Frankfurt. Nowhere was he more relaxed, more full of avuncular wisdom and wisecracking anecdotes. He had refused to come to postwar Germany for years, but had been won over by Brigitta Bohlenball, the vivacious widow of Friedrich Bohlenball, who had almost instantaneously, thanks to a series of shrewd buys, used his Swiss milk fortune and Communist politics (a Swiss Communist: a rara avis indeed!) to become one of Europe’s most stylish publishers. Friedrich had introduced a number of weighty novelists and philosophers before committing suicide at the age of forty, leaving Brigitta and young Friedchen with several hundred million Swiss francs, a villa near Lugano, and a Schloss in the Engadine, not to mention Zurich’s swankiest publishing house.

  “Come, Homer. You’ll have such a good time, I promise you,” Brigitta cooed over lunch at La Caravelle, and she’d made good on her vow, introducing her new American catch to the greatest, which is to say the most snobbish, editors in Europe.

  If a snobbish publisher seems like an oxymoron today, it’s only an indication of how the notion of class has degraded in the postwar era. The aristocrats of European publishing, the Gallimards, Einaudis, and Rowohlts, were good old bourgeois who had gotten through the war more or less intact, though sometimes with not-unblemished political affiliations in their back pockets, as was true for numberless European businessmen. They weren’t very different, mutatis mutandis, from Homer, which is no doubt why he came to feel so at home among them. And he did feel gloriously, chest-thumpingly himself in those smoky, cold fair halls and smoky, overheated hotel bars and restaurants. Membership in Brigitta’s club had long since stilled his qualms about the Krauts, as he still called them, and the saturnalia of Frankfurt had become the high point of Homer’s and Sally’s publishing year.