Muse: A Novel (4 page)

Ida’s unimpeachably expert first book,
Virgin Again,
published by J. Laughlin at New Directions, had appeared to outraged and ecstatic notices in the little magazines, the blogs of the day, when she was an eighteen-year-old rising sophomore at Bryn Mawr. Its scabrous title had nearly gotten her expelled, but Katharine McBride, the incoming president, saw the scandal as an opportunity to demonstrate the forward thinking that had won her the job, and pardoned the young offender. Within a year there had been forty-three articles about red-hot Ida Perkins and/or
Virgin Again
in
Abrasions, Stalactite Review, The Hellions,
and numberless other magazines on both sides of the Atlantic and
the Channel. Richard Aldington, to name only one, had praised the “crystalline purity” of Ida’s “finger-shredding shards” in the
Camberwell Rattlebag.

Two years later, just as the war was ending,
Ember and Icicle
was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber in London and by Laughlin in Connecticut. Eliot wrote Marianne Moore, whose own revolutionary work he had championed two decades previously, “Young Miss Perkins, like you before her, has helped recalibrate my understanding of my origins,” while Moore herself told Ida, “We are pierced by the intricate needlework of your asperitic formulations.” She had the obligatory meeting with Miss Moore on the same bench outside the New York Public Library where the senior poet had met her soon-to-be disciple Elizabeth Bishop, though little seems to have come of their encounter, as far as Paul or anyone else could tell from the available evidence, which included Mollie Macdonald’s scathing cameo portrait of Ida as the promiscuous villainess of
The Bridge Game,
her satire of Seven Sisters womanhood. Neither Moore nor Bishop seems to have had much truck with Ida—and, perhaps unsurprisingly, she turns up nowhere in Bishop’s voluminous correspondence.

And Ida? She herself said very little; at least Paul could discover very little she’d said. Unlike most of the garrulous scribblers of her moment, she blazed across her world silently, cunningly, her only documented words the ones
stamped on the smoking pages of her Faber and ND books—though Sterling succeeded in wooing her over to Impetus as soon as he was able. Apart, that is, from a few barbed remarks caught on the fly (or could they have been manufactured ex post facto?) by the literary memoirists of her era. Millicent Crabtree, in her recollections of life with Sheldon Storm, reported that Ida refused to spend the night in the composer’s weekend house in the Berkshires. “I don’t trust men with fingers that fast,” she is supposed to have complained, insisting on bunking in at a nearby rooming house. She also reportedly told an openmouthed Delmore Schwartz, who up till then had been in hot and voluble pursuit, “Hold your tongue, please, if you want me to hold your prick.”

Was Ida what they used to call a “man’s woman,” with not a lot of time for her sisters in the art? Paul thought it was possible. “Your aloofness and frivolity leave me arrested and … chilled,” Moore wrote on February 15, 1944, after one of their rare meetings, giving Ida the title for her third book, as it turned out.
Aloofness and Frivolity
was published in 1947, its modernist severity and private preoccupations—“navel-gazing,” more than one critic sniffed—seemingly at a far remove from America’s triumphalist postwar mood.

Not that Ida appeared to care. The structure and organizing principles of her first mature period were already well established. Stark dichotomies, rigid caesuras, and the same
dissonances that make modernist music so challenging to the conventional ear were the stuff of her art in the forties and early fifties. Nevertheless, her freshness and informality put her at odds with her contemporaries and competitors, among them the neo-Miltonic Robert Lowell (also a relation, on her mother’s side) and the willfully obscure, surrealist early Bishop. Ida’s love poems—and all her poems were arguably love poems, from first to last—are defined by contrast and dichotomy, the yin and yang of lover and loved one, giver and taker, remover and removed, night and day, growth and decay. A world of ineluctable oppositions with no gray areas: that is early Ida Perkins to a T.

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):

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.