Is that Harold Bloom? Susan Sontag? ‘Muse’ brims with literary barbs.
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Back when I was a sprightly young hotshot, I used to produce parody issues of Book World in that golden age when the section was a Sunday supplement. These were designed — with the help of the art director, Francis Tanabe — as souvenirs for colleagues who were retiring or leaving for other jobs and were meant to affectionately “roast” the recipient. In one I revealed the future literary career, quite grandiose and culminating in the Nobel Prize, of a friend who is currently the editor of a distinguished quarterly; it was headlined “The Chekhov of Fairfax County.” Another, for a guy who loved Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City ,” was composed entirely in the second person, present tense of that hipper-than-thou novel. Over the years, I must have cranked out at least a dozen of these send-ups, and no doubt some of them will surface when I finally go through the cartons of junk I keep in storage.
My parodies were, I hope, funny, but they were also deeply inbred — only Book World staffers would pick up on many of the references. And they were short. Anything more than a couple of pages would have been tiresome.
I mention all this because Jonathan Galassi’s “Muse” is a similar enterprise, a spoof of the late 20th-century book industry, supposedly written sometime after 2021. Brimming with insider references, crammed with made-up literary figures who borrow their idiosyncrasies and mannerisms from various real authors, something of a shadow autobiography of the author and, not least, a showcase for the poetry of the world-famous Ida Perkins, “Muse” is an amusing jeu d’esprit at first, but the nudge-nudge jokes go on much too long. And then, halfway through, the book morphs into a mystery of sorts — who was the muse of Ida Perkins’s last poems? — followed by troubled reflections on the advent of the digital age.
But in those first 150 pages, Galassi — the publisher and president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as a poet and translator of Montale and Leopardi — gives us a book that, while amusing, one doesn’t so much read as puzzle over and decipher. Who is who? What is true? What is invented? Those wishing a crib should pick up Boris Kachka’s “Hothouse,” the gossipy history of FSG. It will help you match up the real people, anecdotes and events with the fictive ones.
For example, Homer Stern of Purcell & Stern is, essentially, the Rabelaisian publisher Roger Straus, while his most visible author, the “nerviest cultural critic of her generation,” Pepita Erskine, is a darker-skinned Susan Sontag. At one point Homer and Pepita sport identical leather jackets, just as Straus and Sontag notoriously did. The roman a clef’s other, rival publisher, tall and handsome Sterling Wainwright of Impetus Editions, is recognizably tall and handsome James Laughlin of New Directions, right down to the passion for skiing and dashing off Catullan love lyrics. Anyone in the publishing business will recognize the literary agent Angus McTaggart, who “adored working his way through Homer’s catalog . . . signing up his unrepresented or badly represented writers and then demanding oversize improvements in their compensation for the next books.” FSG’s trio of Nobel laureates in poetry — Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott — reappear as P&S’s Three Aces, even if Brodksy is now a Georgian émigré named Dmitry Chavchavadze.
Most of this is simple, rather sophomoric fun, the kind of games literary folk play. A satire of Seven Sisters womanhood by Mollie Macdonald? Must be Mary McCarthy’s “The Group.” Is “wild-eyed, extravagant” poet Stephen Roentgen, who hangs out at the White Horse Tavern, more or less Dylan Thomas? Could “critical pooh-bah” Elliott Blossom point to anyone but Harold Bloom? If the last name doesn’t give it way, then the title of Blossom’s book will: “The Covering Cherub,” a term straight out of Bloom’s “The Anxiety of Influence.” Some of Galassi’s funning does skirt simple one-to-one identification: A Nobel Prize-winning Dutch essayist is called van Meegeren, a name mainly associated with a notorious art forger.
I’ve worked in the book trade — on the reviewing end — as long as Galassi, so I got a mild kick out of “Muse.” If I lived in New York, I’d probably pick up on more of its secret shout-outs. Bon vivant and wit Seamus O’Sullivan, a longtime staff writer of the Gothamite: Might this be Brendan Gill of the New Yorker? Or A.J. Liebling? I could guess about the possible identity of a literary agent here called The Nympho, but I won’t. Still, what will ordinary readers make of all this incestuous, our-crowd japery? Much of the time Galassi doesn’t actually do anything with his characters. They wave to us — Hi, I’m disguised here as Elspeth Adams but I’m really the poet Elizabeth Bishop — and that’s it.
Halfway through, however, the pictures-from-an-institution schema is set aside when rising young editor Paul Dukach — Galassi’s stand-in for himself — discovers a mystery surrounding Ida Perkins. Hitherto, we’ve seen samples of Perkins’s verse, and it’s so-so stuff at best, though we’re told that the aging Wallace Stevens declared, “She gives me hope for our future.” No way. How, then, are we to regard the dozen or so poems from her last collection, “Mnemosyne,” which are reproduced here with commentary by Dukach? That book’s eventual publication supposedly crowns Perkins’s ascension into the empyrean: “She is Walt and Emily and Herman and Tom and Wallace and Hilda and Gertrude all rolled into one.” Given the poetry we’ve read, this coronation is absolutely impossible to believe, even in an alternate-world fantasy.
The best poems in the book are actually a pastiche of one of James Laughlin’s vers d’occasion and a little take-off on “In a Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound’s imagist classic:
scalloped
petals sacrificed on
granite
The author of this imperishable masterpiece, the Pound-like Arnold Outerbridge, was “born in Nome in 1905, the son of a trapper and an Inuit woman,” became an apologist for Stalin instead of Mussolini, and reputedly told young Sterling Wainwright: “You’ll never make it as a poet, Sterl. . . . Go home and do something useful — like starting a publishing house.” Another bingo! The sage of Rapallo famously gave Laughlin the same advice.
Throughout these pages, Galassi’s love for literature and the all-too-human people who create it is never in doubt. And he does present a vivid picture of late 20th-century publishing. Nonetheless, an otherwise rollicking chapter on the Frankfurt Book Fair gradually saddens into an elegy for the douceur de vivre before the Revolution.
Near the end of “Muse,” we learn that Purcell & Stern was finally taken over by Medusa, the online e-tailer, rivaled in clout only by the search engine Gigabyte. Come on, now — a flagship of the publishing industry bought by an Internet upstart! Some things are just too far-fetched. But there really should be an Italian poet named Serenghetti.
Michael Dirda reviews books for The Washington Post on Thursdays.
