In these pages, Jonathan Galassi—the longtime publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux—gives us an extraordinarily sensitive, satirically sharp novel set in the world of books that he knows so well. At the center is Paul Dukach, editor-in-chief and heir apparent at Purcell & Stern, one of New York’s last great independent publishing houses. But despite all his success, Paul remains obsessed with the writer who got away: the poet Ida Perkins, whose outsize life and work have made her a celebrity—and who is published by Stern’s biggest rival.
When Paul at last meets Ida at her Venetian palazzo, she entrusts him with her greatest secret—one that will change all their lives. Filled with juicy details only a quintessential insider could know, Muse is a salty valentine to the people who write, sell, and, above all, read the books that shape our lives.
In these pages, Jonathan Galassi—the longtime publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux—gives us an extraordinarily sensitive, satirically sharp novel set in the world of books that he knows so well. At the center is Paul Dukach, editor-in-chief and heir apparent at Purcell & Stern, one of New York’s last great independent publishing houses. But despite all his success, Paul remains obsessed with the writer who got away: the poet Ida Perkins, whose outsize life and work have made her a celebrity—and who is published by Stern’s biggest rival.
When Paul at last meets Ida at her Venetian palazzo, she entrusts him with her greatest secret—one that will change all their lives. Filled with juicy details only a quintessential insider could know, Muse is a salty valentine to the people who write, sell, and, above all, read the books that shape our lives.
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Overview
In these pages, Jonathan Galassi—the longtime publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux—gives us an extraordinarily sensitive, satirically sharp novel set in the world of books that he knows so well. At the center is Paul Dukach, editor-in-chief and heir apparent at Purcell & Stern, one of New York’s last great independent publishing houses. But despite all his success, Paul remains obsessed with the writer who got away: the poet Ida Perkins, whose outsize life and work have made her a celebrity—and who is published by Stern’s biggest rival.
When Paul at last meets Ida at her Venetian palazzo, she entrusts him with her greatest secret—one that will change all their lives. Filled with juicy details only a quintessential insider could know, Muse is a salty valentine to the people who write, sell, and, above all, read the books that shape our lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804172493 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/28/2016 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Jonathan Galassi is the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and the author of three collections of poetry, as well as acclaimed translations of the Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. A former Guggenheim Fellow and poetry editor of The Paris Review, he also writes for The New York Review of Books and other publications.
Read an Excerpt
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 cam- pus 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 con- tracts 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 com- missioned 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 Frankfurt every year to see if we’re still alive.” Some, alas, were not. The worst were former bigwigs who had the bad taste to reap- pear, 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 carnivorous- ness 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 commit- ting 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, muta- tis 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.
They appeared as a couple, and indeed many of Homer’s foreign colleagues, some of whom enjoyed not-dissimilar domestic arrangements, thought they were married. Paul remembered a dinner at Homer’s town house soon after he’d joined the company with a number of P & S’s better-known foreign authors, including Piergiorgio Ponchielli and his wife, Anita Moreno, and Marianne O’Loane. Norberto Beltraffio, one of Homer’s most exuberant European colleagues, sailed into the drawing room while Homer was seeing to the wine and, throwing his arms wide, asked the assembled crowd, “Where’s Sally?” Luckily, Iphigene was also out of the room.
As a rule, Homer and Sally spent a long weekend at a spa on Lake Constance, resting up for the ardors of the fair, and afterward flew on to London or Paris to recover in style for a week or two. They were gone for a month’s vacation, as some back in New York had it, and on the company dime.
Over the years, he’d come to be seen by many as the dean of Frankfurt’s gang of literary publishers, “the King of the fair,” as Brigitta had crowned him. His engagement in its rites, his small dinner at the fair’s end every year, for which some leading European publishers stayed late, his charm and mode of dress, which fit right in here and didn’t feel extravagant or slightly garish as it could in New York, even his contraband Cuban cigars—all added to Homer’s stature in the halls and watering holes of Frankfurt. The Spar- tan P & S booth, which echoed his no-frills offices in New York, was tacked onto a large international distributor’s stand and overflowed with visitors from all over Europe, Latin America, and Asia, come to kiss the gold seal ring on Homer’s well-veined hand.
There were other Frankfurts going on simultaneously that Homer and Sally and Paul, who had been attending with them for the past few years, had nothing to do with. The Big (i.e., irrelevant commercial) Publishers, the Random Houses and HarperCollinses and Simon & Schusters and Hachettes, wheeled and dealt multimillion-dollar con- tracts among themselves, though increasingly the agents were holding on to their authors’ foreign rights, stalking the halls and booths like hyenas, or even, egregiously, like the upstart McTaggart, setting up their own stands with spiffy little tables and printed catalogs several inches thick handed out by demure young people, aping the publishers themselves (the nerve!). And then there was the religious publishers’ Frankfurt; the techies’ and scientists’ Frankfurt; the illustrated book publishers’ Frankfurt; the university press publishers’ Frankfurt; the developing world publishers’ Frankfurt. Not to mention the hosting German publishers’ Frankfurt, which was not just for one-on-one publisher-to-publisher deal making, but for the authors, the critics and journalists—believe it or not, books and writers were still news in Germany—and, after the first couple of days, the public, too. They gawked and dawdled like the tourists they were, till the aisles were virtually impassable.
All these fairs, and others, too, were going on at the same time in the same cavernous spaces, which were like the biggest big-box stores ever built, their denizens streaming into the fairgrounds, riding half-mile-long mobile walkways, hitching rides on commuter trains from the beautiful old central railway station so evocative for Paul of prewar Europe, drinking late into the night in the dangerously crowded lobbies of the hotels, hungover and sleepless and hoarse by day, complaining and fibbing and wheedling and smoking and drinking, gorging and lying and drinking and fucking by night, and having the time of their lives.
To the literary publishers, however, Frankfurt was theirs and theirs alone. They set the tone; they published the Authors Who Mattered—and who sometimes unwisely showed up for receptions and speeches, though those with any self- awareness soon realized they were irrelevant encumbrances to the business at hand. The literary publishers were the Lords of Culture, the master parasites sitting on top of this swarming dunghill. Their sense of their own importance showed when they walked the halls, rolling from side to side as if they were on board an ocean liner—which in a sense they were, without knowing it: a slow-moving Ship of Fools behemoth, heading willy-nilly for the great big digital iceberg. They convened in gemütlich private receptions to which the riffraff were not invited (exclusive invitations were a ritual of the fair, sent out months in advance and occasionally even coveted). They eyed each other sharply but unobtrusively as they fibbed about their latest finds, which might conceivably be but most of the time emphatically were not the Major Contributions to World Literature they aimed to pass them off as. The pros among these gentlemanly thieves understood each other perfectly: where amity ended and commerce held sway; where commerce took a backseat and long loyalty asserted its claims. Homer was widely generous with his information, be it good or bad, and he was a past master at spreading the rumors that were the lifeblood of Frankfurt: that McTaggart was moving Hummock from Gallimard to Actes Sud; that Hum- mock had dumped McTaggart for the Nympho; that the Nympho was selling her agency to William Morris lock, stock, and barrel.
Homer would make special deals to keep certain authors within the inner circle—the cénacle, or cartel, some might call it—of independent houses that was informally run by him and his partners in crime. It was old-fashioned horse- trading, sure, but it often proved salutary for the authors, for over time, if they truly had the stuff (and some of them did; if not, the whole house of cards would have collapsed long ago), their international stature would gradually mature, and their readership would inevitably spread like their publishers’ waistlines.
Quite a few of Homer’s authors—more than from any other American house except FSG, a constant thorn in his side—had ended up with the Big One, the Giant Kahuna, the platinum standard in World Literature, the highest of stakes, for which he was always playing: the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded by the hypersecretive Swedish Academy. In the United States, the Nobel didn’t quite have the commercial heft it did elsewhere, but its prestige was still unparalleled. In recent years Homer had taken to raking in Nobels the way some collect watches. Seven of the last twelve literature prizes had gone to P & S authors, to the disgruntlement of many. Homer had been heard to boast that he was on familiar terms with the king of Sweden, whose major duty seemed to be handing out the Nobel medals.
The prize was traditionally announced on the Thursday of the fair at one p.m., during the frenetic lunch hour. The big cheeses were far too suave to stand around waiting for the announcement; nevertheless, their underlings knew how to reach them at the all-important moment. This year, for the first time in decades, Homer hadn’t come to Frankfurt; he was having a hip replacement that couldn’t be postponed, and Sally had stayed home to help nurse him. So Paul was there on his own to carry the flag, gingerly treading in his boss’s oversize footsteps through the set-in-stone routine of meetings and receptions, trying not to appear like the underdressed hick he felt he must be taken for by Homer’s cliquish crowd.
In 2010, as had been the case for the past few years, Ida Perkins was rumored to be on the short list for the Nobel. How accurate such speculation was, was anybody’s guess. The putatively short-listed candidates—nobody knew if there actually was a short list—often failed to emerge as winners; and if a writer was mentioned year after year, she or he could become stale goods, even less likely to garner the ultimate accolade than the dark horses—though stale goods could miraculously become fresh-baked overnight and end up winning, as had happened more than once. This year Ida, who at eighty-four had entered Now or Never territory, was again being actively discussed as a potential winner: it was time for an American, a woman, a poet: why not all three in one?
“Now you must tell me, Paul,” whined Maria Mariasdottir, who’d cornered him one evening in the Frankfurter Hof bar, a suite of spacious rooms furnished with lots of, but never enough, sofas and chairs on the ground floor of Hitler’s favorite hotel, though it was larger and dowdier than the more exclusive Hessischer Hof across town. At night the Frankfurter Hof became an even sweatier, smokier mosh pit than the Hessischer Hof, so packed with literary flesh peddlers you could barely move. Paul thought of it as the third circle of Hell.
“Who,” Maria kept asking, “is this Ida Perkins?”
Maria was a hardworking, sloe-eyed, shapely young publisher from Reykjavik who often appealed to her fellow publishers in other territories for tips since she couldn’t afford the staff to read most of the books submitted to her.
“Ida Perkins is to American poetry as Proust is to the French novel. Seriously.” Paul recoiled internally hearing himself talking Frankfurt-speak, a repulsive commercial shorthand he loathed yet had developed a disgusting facility with—even when it came to Ida; though she wasn’t “his” author, he felt compelled to spread the word about her at every opportunity. It was nearing midnight, long past his normal witching hour, but the crowd was just beginning to thicken like a rancid sauce. He knew he’d had far too much to drink and needed to get back to his two-star hotel in the red-light district near the Hauptbahnhof.
“Yes, but is she really good? I mean really, really, really good? I need to know.”
“Yes, Maria, Ida is really, really, really good—absolutely the top. I’m telling you it’s true—and we don’t even publish her, alas.”
“Are you sure, because translating her will be so difficult, so expensive . . .”
“Maria, I don’t know your market. All I know is that Ida Perkins is the American poet of our time. And her work is going to last. Ask Matthias Schoenborn if you don’t believe me. He’s bringing out her Collected next year. Ask Beltraffio. Ask Jean-Marie Groddeck. They’re all convinced.” The fact that certain prestigious publishers had an author on their lists often carried irrational weight with their foreign colleagues.
“Yes, but is she really, really good?”
“Really, really, really good, Maria. Really.” He hoped he wasn’t slurring his words, but feared he just might be.
“I’m doubtful,” she said.
Paul threw up his hands and planted a smooch on the nonplussed Maria’s forehead (most Europeans were deft practitioners of the air kiss, where lips never touched skin, but Americans often failed to carry it off). At least Maria really, really wanted to know if Ida was worth translating. The truth was, what was hot in New York was often dead on arrival in Reykjavik, and vice versa—that was the terrible truth, and maybe the saving grace, of international publishing. Paul sometimes had reason to wish there were a Frankfurt morning-after pill; but a deal was a deal, even one shaken on when one of the parties—or, better, both—was two or three sheets to the wind.
So Paul was feeling cautious when he sat down in Homer’s stead at Matthias Schoenborn’s table in the German hall the next morning for their annual discussion—lecture might have been a better word—about Matthias’s prizewinning, best-selling Mitteleuropean authors. If Homer had been there, he and Matthias, who were mad about each other, would have spent their half hour telling off-color jokes and denigrating their closest collaborators, as happy as pigs in shit, but Paul knew he would have to settle for an actual business meeting. Experience told him that few or none of the writers Matthias would be pitching were likely to make an impact in America, just as he knew in his heart of hearts that Matthias, who was one of the shrewdest showboats among the international publishers, much admired for his ebullience and his nonstop promoting of his writers—a kind of latter-day European version of Homer—had no deep interest in the authors Homer and Paul published. Sure, Matthias would grumble about the fact that Eric Nielsen, now an enormous international presence, was published by Friedchen Bohlenball, though Matthias hadn’t shown the slightest interest when Paul had buttonholed him excitedly about his discovery years ago. The truth was, Matthias didn’t care about what Paul was doing any more than Paul cared about Matthias’s Russian and Iranian émigrés eking out an existence as cabbies in Berlin. Still, they sat and talked animatedly every year—“He lies to me and I lie to him,” as Homer put it—and went to each other’s parties and were the best of Frankfurt pals, listening all the while for signs in each other’s cascading verbiage of that rarest of things, the world-class author who could make a difference for both of them. How to listen, Paul had come to feel, was the real test of Homer’s publishing “truffle hound.” Many, unfortunately, listened only to themselves.
Still, over the years, Matthias and Homer and now Paul had shared certain core writers who had had an international impact, among them Homer’s Three Aces. And Matthias, a respected avant-garde writer himself (Homer had published several of his dark, abstruse short novels before giving up the ghost), was Ida’s German publisher, too, and he was well aware of Paul’s passion for her and her work. Being the canny insider he was, Matthias often seemed to have privileged information about deliberations in Stock- holm, and this year was no exception.
“It’s possible,” he told Paul. “There are other currents afoot, but it’s possible.”
Paul didn’t know what to make of these gnomic tea leaves. All he could do was what everyone else was doing: wait.
He was at the booth at one o’clock, but the silence was deafening. After an excruciating wait, word went around that Hendrijk David of the Netherlands had squeaked out enough votes to take the prize. It was said he’d been expecting it for years, sitting complacently by the phone on the appointed morning each October.
The rumor, though, turned out to be erroneous. Dries van Meegeren, another, far more obscure Dutch essayist, had won, setting off an unseemly free-for-all for the acquisition of his largely still-available rights. Publishers from nearly everywhere, who before today had never heard of van Meegeren, swarmed the normally empty Dutch hall, anxious to buy themselves a Nobel Prize winner. The booth of De Bezige Bee, The Busy Bee, van Meegeren’s lucky publisher, resembled a rebooking desk in an airline terminal after a canceled flight. (David, meanwhile, never recovered, dying in bitter disappointment a couple of years later.)
In any case, the prize hadn’t gone to Ida. Paul consoled himself with the fact that her not having won meant she still could.
He phoned Homer once the office was open in New York.
“Can you believe Dries won?” he cackled, giddy with dis- belief. Van Meegeren had been campaigning for the Nobel for ages, going on reading tours across Scandinavia, writing articles about the work of Swedish Academy members, even taking up with a Swedish woman reputed to be on a first- name basis with the academy’s secretary.
“That gonif has been kissing Swedish ass for years,” Homer answered. “I was hoping for Les or Adam. I need my Four of a Kind, you know.”
“It will happen, Homer. All in good time. Everyone here sends love.” Paul relayed greetings from a passel of Homer’s long-standing confreres.
“Keep your nose clean and have fun. I’ll see you Monday.”
“Not Monday. Remember, I’m going to visit Ida Perkins in Venice after the fair.”
“Right.” Paul could hear Homer clearing his throat across the ocean. “Well, give her a slap on the ass for me, and tell her our arms are always open. Keep me posted!”
“Will do—at least the second and third parts,” Paul answered, and rang off. The fair had another two days to run, but he could hardly wait for it to be over. He sleep- walked through his appointments and forced himself to put in an appearance at a few receptions, trying to muster the enthusiasm to host the firm’s Friday night dinner in Homer’s stead. He couldn’t help feeling that, like him, Homer’s pals would be on autopilot without their Fearless Leader to mirror back their well-rehearsed performances as cultural grandees—marshals of France, someone called them. Self-importance was ubiquitous, Paul knew, but there was a particular smarmy pungency to the horse-trading in Frankfurt that he found revolting, especially when he was engaging in it. It was a far cry from the poetry of Ida Perkins or the novels of Ted Jonas, sweated out in anguish and solitude. The idea of Ida or Eric Nielsen or Pepita here among these overdressed, overfed word merchants who acted as if they owned their writers’ hides made him faintly ill.
On Friday evening he stood in his off-the-rack suit at a long table in an otherwise deserted hotel restaurant as Homer’s crowd—Brigitta, Norberto, Matthias, Beatriz, Jorge and Lalli, Héloise, Gianni, Teresa—sat expectantly, waiting, he was sure, for him to commit an unforced error. He made a stab at imitating Homer’s offhand delivery of one of his risqué toasts, but Paul’s own attempts at public humor usually came off a little forced. All seemed to be going along all right, though, until he made the mistake of mentioning e-books:
“Why, before you know it, you’ll be enjoying Padraic and Thor and Pepita and Dmitry on your own devices, just like us!” he exclaimed with ersatz jollity, given that he’d never opened an e-reader himself.
It was as if he’d farted at the table or mentioned the Holocaust. Brigitta and Matthias stared at each other bug- eyed and sucked in their cheeks, like specters out of Goya’s Disasters of War, imagining the digital horde advancing from the West like the latest strain of American influenza. Thank God they would be too old to care when it reached their shores.
Paul shrank down in his seat. What would Homer and Sally say when word reached them, as it assuredly would, that he’d demonstrated once and for all how unsuited he was for this well-padded, backward-looking world?
He couldn’t wait to breathe the fetid air of his beloved Venice, where he often escaped after the mind-numbing hothouse of the fair. He washed down the rest of his veal chop with too much syrupy Rotwein, ushered his last guests out of the funereal restaurant, and caught the midnight train with minutes to spare. He arrived in Venice early the next morning, sleepless but jangly with excitement.
He splurged on a water taxi down the Grand Canal, stunned as always to be confronted with how truly strange Venice was. The shut-up palaces fell straight into the oily loden-colored water (what held them up?). The sky alternated between pearlescent and Bellini blue. He felt gusts of enchantment and resistance, elation and revulsion. Venice was a hallucinatory incubus, the most artificial environment in the world: Disneyland for grown-ups. It reeked of sex and its putrescent partner, death. Thomas Mann had caught its rouged, feverish aura perfectly.
What was Ida Perkins, the avatar of red-cheeked American expansiveness and optimism, doing here? This was a place to hide, to fade away—not to grab life by the lapels, as she always had. Had Ida become infected by A.O.’s old man’s despondency? Or had she found a new lease on life with Leonello Moro? Was Ida still Ida?
Paul spent the morning wandering, struck yet again by the seemingly chance beauty of Italian public spaces, shaken down over time into nonchalant irregularity and aptness. He had always felt lighter in Italy, unburdened by expectations, his own or anyone else’s; he could move at will here, unimpeded and unobserved, as he sometimes could in New York, too, actually, walking anonymous in the noon- time crowd. He had lunch in the autumn sun at a trattoria in the Campo Santo Stefano, and made stabs at resuscitat- ing his dormant Italian. He reread Ida’s Venice book, Aria di Giudecca, which was as alive to the decay and incandes- cence of the city as anything he knew (“city of Jewish saints / of cul-de-sacs and feints / of stains and taints”). Then he started leafing through his transcriptions of A.O.’s note- books while he sipped his espresso:
14 june 1987
8:45 caffè latte, pane al cioccolato
10:15 Dr. Giannotti
14:30 computer
15:40 phone call—U.S.
16:20 Debenedetti
17:00 seamstress
20:00 Celine
hair heaven glimmer thread error reflect pillow binding
Seamstress? Why would Arnold see a seamstress? Paul shivered a little as the gathering shadows overtook the afternoon sun. Then he returned to his reading. On Mon- day he was going to meet Ida Perkins. He had lots of questions and he wanted to be prepared.
Reading Group Guide
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Muse, the debut novel by the publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi, which features an irresistible literary love triangle at its center.
1. Muse begins with the announcement: “This is a love story.” What are some of the different kinds of love that are evoked, tested, and perhaps defeated in the novel—for people, ideas, works of literature, and so on? What does Paul in particular learn are the dangers of falling too fast or too deeply in love?
2. How does the novel build up the legend of poet Ida Perkins from its opening pages? Are there writers living today—writers of poetry, fiction, or nonfiction—who have a similar iconic status in America? How realistic is the author’s portrayal of Ida and of the publishing world?
3. Discuss the differences and similarities between Sterling Wainwright and Homer Stern, Paul’s two publishing mentors, about whom we learn: “Both were spoiled, handsome, charming ladies’ men with a nose for writers. . . . They cordially detested each other, and greatly enjoyed doing so” (15). What does it mean to be a rival over many years with someone in a tight-knit field? And what, despite their respective publishing houses’ very different lists, draws them both so ardently to Ida Perkins?
4. How does Paul straddle the divide between the old and young guard of the publishing industry?
5. Over the course of the pages of Muse, how does Jonathan Galassi convey the details of publishing a book, including through the roles of the various characters—publisher, editor, agent, production, designer and jacket artist, author, critic, bookseller, etc.?
6. When reflecting on his life as an editor, Paul thinks about how he “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” (58). What does this tell you about him as a character, and the solitary, immersive, and meticulous work of an editor?
7. How does Homer cultivate loyalty among the employees of Purcell & Stern, including Paul, even within Homer’s “alpha male need to dominate” (19)? How do you feel about Homer, both as a man and as a publisher, by the end of the story?
8. At the two main publishing houses portrayed in Muse, Impetus and P & S, what is the balance of power between men and women? How do women like Ida, Homer’s assistant Sally Savarin, the critic Pepita Erskine, and Maxine exert their own kind of influence in the novel’s literary community?
9. Describe Paul’s relationship with the upstate NY (Hattersville) independent bookstore Pages and with Morgan Dickerman. How does his loyalty to Morgan and her world evolve over time, and why?
10. What are some of the things that lure Paul to New York City? What tools as a novelist does Galassi use to paint a portrait of life in the city, both in and out of the publishing industry, that is at once cutthroat and romantic?
11. What are the principal characteristics of Ida’s poetic style, and what facets of both her work and her unconventional personal life does Paul, who says he felt “like an alien born in the wrong family” (25), connect to most?
12. What is the effect of Galassi’s insertion of real literary and public figures (such as Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and President Obama) alongside individuals with real-life inspirations (but changed names) and wholly imagined figures into this work of fiction? In what other ways do you suspect Galassi’s experience as a poet and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux come through in this novel?
13. How does Galassi strike a balance between writing Muse as a roman à clef and as a bildungsroman and/or romance on its own terms, and between using humor/satire and genuine emotion to tell this story? Which among the novel’s various aspects kept you most engaged?
14. Is Muse a comedy, a satire, or a realistic novel? How does Galassi play with these different genres and kinds of humor in his book and why?
15. Do Sterling and Homer assess their writers more for their commercial success or their literary merits and prestige? Where does Paul wind up landing in the spectrum of valuing a writer’s so-called worth?
16. What is special about “the Magic Kingdom” (88) of Hiram’s Corners, including its history? How does its atmosphere affect Paul and the work he does there decoding Arnold Outerbridge’s notebooks?
17. Why is Homer so deeply in his element at the Frankfurt Book Fair? What do the goings-on, including the announcement of the Nobel Prize winner, and various relationships among publishing people at the fair, illustrate about the role of reputation and status in publishing?
18. When Paul visits Ida at the Palazzo Moro in Venice, are his high expectations about her, as a poet and woman, and the place in general met? What does this encounter teach Paul about the difference between writers’ work and their actual lives, their legend and their reality?
19. What do you think Ida hopes to gain by entrusting Paul with the manuscript of Mnemosyne? Why, although this is their first meeting, do you think she confesses so much about her life and work to him?
20. Did you agree with Paul’s decision to publish Ida’s work? Whom did he betray by doing so? What does this decision say about the repercussions of publishing “confessional” writing and the responsibilities of editors, publishers, and authors to themselves and one another?
21. Were you surprised by the way the pages of Mnemosyne and Paul’s interpretation of them reveal the secrets of Ida’s past? Does this investigation of her poetry support any of Paul’s ideas about writers infusing their lives into their work?
22. What was your reaction to the poetry in Muse, which although “written” by Ida Perkins in the novel was penned by Galassi himself? Did this literary layering or ventriloquizing remind you of other authors or books—for example James Joyce, Colm Tóibín, A. S. Byatt, or others?
23. Who is Mnemosyne? How does she relate to Ida? What does the love affair evoked in the poems of the manuscript say about Ida, about her work, about the life she has lived—and how does this relate to the dominate themes in Muse?
24. How does Galassi address, directly and indirectly, some of the real-life conflicts and issues affecting publishing in the contemporary world? What is the difference for Paul in “discovering” an author among piles of manuscripts versus digital publishing? How are his romantic relationships also tied up in the epic, for him and his colleagues, battle between traditional and digital publishing?
25. What keeps Paul from leaving P & S for Medusa? Does his loyalty to the world of publishing he grew up in, and to the memories of Sterling and Homer and Ida, pay off in the end? Do you think the publishing future suggested at the end of the book is realistic, or is it meant satirically?
26. What does the Concise Bibliography of Ida’s work at the end of Muse reveal about her legacy and Paul’s contribution to it, even beyond his publishing of Mnemosyne? What does it say about the way publishing itself is changing?
27. What kind of book is Muse, in the end? What are your feelings about writing and literature and their relationship to life at the end of the book?
28. Do you feel about any writers or books from your own reading experiences the way Paul does about Ida? What have been some of your most memorable or transformative reading experiences?
Interviews
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Jonathan Galassi
What is your earliest memory of writing a story?
A twenty-page novel in seventh grade. And I fooled around with writing a kind of mystery. I recently found a notebook that showed I was writing fiction over thirty years ago. Somewhere deep in me was a desire to write a novel.
When and where do you write? What does your work space look like?
I do a lot of it on vacation. I can write anywhere that's quiet. I have a study in my apartment, but I often work in the kitchen of a house that we rent in the country. A lot of Muse was written in rented houses. I'm not fetishistic about location. I love working in small rooms, but I can do it anywhere. Computers make it so easy.
What does a publisher do all day? What are the habits of that job, and what does the day-to-day schedule look like?
I deal with the authors I work with, agents, and other departments of the company, talking about both the books that I'm working on and everyone else's. Then there's dealing with foreign publishers: foreigners visit all the time. People want to bounce things off the publisher, and a lot of it is encouragement. And sometimes discouragement! So, not that different from what everyone does.
In a 1997 interview with Harvard magazine you said, "It's a very unsettled moment in publishing right now. I have queasy feelings about the state of the marketplace." In 2015, has your stomach settled?
The marketplace has shaken down a lot in twenty years. I'm older, so maybe my queasiness is a little curdled. There are certain things I am optimistic about. For one, eBooks are going to be a part of our market; they are not going to run our market. So "real" books are here to stay: certainly as long as I'm going to be around, and for a lot longer, I think.
My biggest concern about the market is the force that acts to drive down price, because I think that's destructive to authors as well as publishers. Our biggest battle is to underline the value of intellectual property. People should pay for it. They should want to. It's the fundamental problem in publishing: are books worth a lot? They should be worth a lot. People spend great time and energy writing them, editing them, producing them. They are not a commodity. They're not a pair of socks.
In your estimation, what makes for a great muse? Influence, fervor, beauty, charisma? Do they still walk among us?
The muse is more the value that someone else ascribes to someone, rather than their intrinsic character. That's part of the point of the book: people make an icon of someone based on their own needs or desires. But yes, there are definitely muses who are walking among us. And anyone who is a believer has a muse. The muse is what they believe in: the incarnation of your faith, of your ultimate values.
What drew you to translating the poetry of lyrical Italian poets of two unique eras? What goes into translating classical literature artfully? How much of yourself are you bringing into it, and how is the process different than writing your own novel?
It's both an exercise and a chance to write something with very strict rules, but that is still yours in some way. I have Italian ancestry. My grandfather was Italian. So I wanted to go deep: Montale was the ultimate ride into that. Then I went further back to Leopardi, who is really the greatest nineteenth century poet.
A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text. How do you make your sausage? You put an awful lot into it.
Which books are you most proud to have published?
I've been lucky to work with a lot of great writers, and I'm not going to be taking credit for their greatness. Take Jonathan Franzen, for instance. I've worked with on all his books, and I'm proud that I recognized his talent when he was twenty- seven years old. Tom Friedman would be another. It's hard to single out certain books or authors: what I'm proud is the consistency of what FSG has made, and that we've stayed true to our vision of what literature can be. Each book is part of a tapestry.
Are there books that you think readers of today might benefit from either discovering or rediscovering? Is there something that you wish people would read, or read more often, that you think is uniquely suited to our present moment?
I wish that readers today would be reading the great fiction of the past. E. M. Forster, Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal. It always makes the reading of newer books more interesting. The more bedrock that readers have, the more they enjoy what they're reading now.
As a writer, are there genres or mediums that you've not yet attempted to work in, but would like to try? I always wanted to write a musical. Song lyrics are the ultimate genre for me. I'm sixty-five years old. I don't know how many more I've got in me, but I'm writing another novel now. I loved writing Muse: it was a totally fun, huge challenge. I never thought I could do it.
Is there a particular reason why you think it happened now rather than at a different point in your career?
It's the now-or-never syndrome. Writing is play. I started it one summer. I put it away for a year without looking at it, then went back to it, and decided to take the plunge. Giving yourself permission to write . . . that's what you really need to be a writer. Putting aside your self-critical faculties enough to let yourself get going. That's why I put it aside for a year. I didn't want to edit myself out of existence.
Whether in the field of writing, editing, translating, or publishing, is there a recurring piece of advice that rings through your head in any of those fields?
One is being willing to cut. Being willing to get rid of a lot of stuff that you love but might not actually push your book forward effectively. I learned that, but it was hard!
Franzen was saying yesterday that the more you write, the harder it becomes to write. You've written about the easy stuff, so you have to dig deeper into tougher things that you might not want to talk about. That's a function of giving yourself permission to dig. There's only one way to write a poem, because every other thing you might say is inauthentic: it's not convincing to you. You have to stick close to what's true, which is to say: true to what you feel.
—August 24, 2015