Muse: A Novel (7 page)

“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.

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

(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 the 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.