Telling insider stories
You don’t have to be a publishing insider or English prof to enjoy Jonathan Galassi’s Muse, but without a passing knowledge of the main players and heroes of 20th-century literature, you’ll miss most of the novel’s rich, witty references to that almost vanished world. That would be a shame as Galassi, a longtime editor and now president of legendary publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, obviously had a great time transforming over four decades of immersion in the trenches of American lit into the backdrop for his dense, comic novel.
The accomplishments and foibles of real-life authors Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and John Updike appear alongside such invented writers as Abe Burack, Byron Hummock and Jonathan Targoff, obvious stand-ins for Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud.
Rising above this cauldron of literary talent and ego is Ida Perkins, the most celebrated and widely enjoyed poet of the postwar era, a witty, mysterious, beautiful muse and poetic guide to generations of practitioners and readers. Perkins, another of Galassi’s inventions, embodies the allure of America’s last literary Golden Age, when works of challenging poetry or literary fiction were published to a broad readership who consumed these books as if they were “liquor, perfume, sex and glory.”
If Perkins represents the best of American lit after the war, Homer Stern and Sterling Wainwright are stand-ins for the type of eccentric “gentleman publishers” who delivered these unabashedly literary authors to an adoring public. Stern is the president of Purcell & Stern (based on Farrar, Straus & Giroux), while Wainwright runs the smaller and slightly more prestigious Impetus Editions, a stand-in for the real firm New Directions. The men have fostered a long-running public feud while admiring and coveting each other’s stable of authors.
Bridging the rival houses is young editor Paul Dukach, who works as an editor for Stern while cultivating a friendship with Wainwright. His loyalty is tested when Wainwright enlists him to help decode the notebooks of a deceased Ezra Pound-esque poet who was also Ida Perkins’ second husband. An ecstatic fan of Perkins since his lonely adolescence, Dukach takes up Wainwright’s offer and eventually meets Perkins, who bestows on him a manuscript of her own to be published after her death.
Dukach’s foray into literary detective work provides the shell on which the plot of Muse is built. That plot, such as it is, is really an excuse for Galassi to rhapsodize on the deep joys of reading literature, as well as a way of celebrating and eulogizing the independent publishing houses that have largely been swept up and conglomerated by multinational corporations.
The results are decidedly mixed. Galassi spends too much time in the novel’s first half indulging his fondness for literary injokes and barely disguised tall tales from the publishing industry’s heyday while the plot languishes. And for someone who so obviously admires the power of the written word, he demonstrates a surprising and disappointing taste for clichés. Stern’s rare displays of benevolence to his overworked staff are received “like catnip,” while characters fall “head over heels” for each other, their “hearts racing.”
Galassi does an excellent job of building up readers for Ida Perkins’ eventual meeting with Paul Dukach, which is played out in an extended scene that resonates through to the novel’s conclusion. Perkins is mercurial and brilliant, but vulnerable and egotistic in equal measure. Her accomplishments as a female poet also allow Galassi to question, and turn on its head, the idea of the feminine muse that animates so much traditional poetry and verse.
Had Galassi been so bold in the opening chapters, Musemight have inspired a newer generation of acolytes praying at literature’s altar. James Grainger is the author of Harmless.