These days Jonathan
Galassi could be doing worse: president and publisher of the storied Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, eminent editor, distinguished translator from the Italian (including
poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi), accomplished poet, and now,
acclaimed debut novelist, with his new book
Muse. (VICE published an excerpt in this month's fiction issue.) Where others might be resting on their laurels, Galassi has sought out new paths
for himself, in his writing as well as his personal life. A consummate man of
letters, he is also a shrewd businessman with a history of sharp decisions: Among
his most famous early coups was his signing of Scott Turow's
Presumed Innocent, the best-selling
legal thriller published in 1987, made into a 1990 film. Galassi's authors have
won Nobel Prizes (Seamus Heaney), Pulitzers, and National Book Awards. He is
noted for his longtime shepherding of the work of Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey
Eugenides. Full disclosure: I myself am lucky to be one of Jonathan's poets. He's edited me since he accepted my first book of poems,
Same Life, in 2007.
Muse channels a complex range of Galassi's experience, offering
a gently satirical insider's take on the publishing industry—or the way it
might have been in the late 20th century—as well as a hymn to writers and their
work. The novel operates at a brisk, frequently witty clip, introducing us to a
cast of semi-recognizable yet enjoyably scrambled characters: charismatic,
decidedly un-PC publishers; romantic young strivers; and authors galore, bearing
down on their work, occasionally throwing fits, more often engaging ardently
and seriously with "the fascination of what's difficult," as Yeats put it. We
get sexual shenanigans, European set pieces, double-dealings in business and
love. The novel encompasses much, and centers on its figure of romance, Ida
Perkins, celebrity poet of the 20th century. In the gloriously confected Ida
(siren, muse, best-seller, hailed by apparently everyone from T. S. Eliot to
rock musicians), literature—and literary history—has the heroine it wished it
had.
Galassi's debut is,
then, both a love story and a comic opera. We already know the publisher to be
a sensitive, erudite poet and essayist, but with
Muse, Galassi lets his comedic freak-flag fly. Yet there is
throughout this book a combination of delicacy and vigor. It's as if the more
expansive zones of the novel genre allowed him to work in multiple modes, to
bring his capacity for sharp social observation in line with his lyrical abilities.
Indeed,
Muse features extracts from
the (imagined) volumes of Ida Perkins. This is one of the many pleasures
of the novel—its deeply serious commitment to
play.
This past spring
I was in Florence, visiting some of the places Galassi had recommended—not
least places important to Montale. We have a fairly regular email conversation
going, and I wanted to hear Galassi say more about
Muse, which is both a departure and, for now, a culmination. He obliged, and our edited exchange appears below.
VICE: Who—or what—was
the muse of
Muse?
Jonathan Galassi:
I think the muse of Muse is
an idea: The idea that there
are muses, that writers and their art
can actually mean the world to us, can change how we feel and think and live.
Muse reads in part like a juicy
roman-
à clef—with
hilarious and dead-on portraits of this famous publisher, that lauded author,
that notorious agent, the Frankfurt Book Fair, all kinds of wheeling and
dealing and assessing and ranking. As the president of FSG, did you worry about
the knock-on effects of publishing such a potentially scandalous book?
Well, let's remember
that the book is fiction, and not
necessarily
straight-up realist fiction at that. It
looks at its subjects through a slightly distorted, rose-colored—and maybe
occasionally jaundiced—comic lens. Nothing and no one in it is meant to be
taken literally. Some may feel they recognize traits or foibles of this or that
figure, occasionally with reason, no doubt, but the characters are meant to be
iconic, avatars of a time and place that has largely gone by the boards. I
started from what I knew—that's what they tell you to do, isn't it?—and I took
off from there.
For
all its worldly aplomb and satirical elements,
Muse is, as the narrator
observes, "a love story," a multilayered romance—with poetry, literature, and publishing
itself. What are your thoughts on romance, optimism?
Yes, it's a
love story, a kind of elegy for a colorful, affection-inspiring way of life
that has become historical in many senses, though I'd say the very core of the
publishing process, which is the editor's passion for the writer's work, hasn't
changed one whit. Everything else has transformed around it, but that foundational
recognition, that commitment, is still what it's all about. It's an
utterly genuine kind of romantic love, with all the pitfalls and rewards and
chances for misunderstanding, betrayal, and disillusionment—and, yes, lifelong
fidelity—that youthful infatuation involves. It's still happening every day,
which means that this game is going to keep on being played, though on a
different-looking board, no doubt.
As a young editor, I can remember moping for weeks and weeks about losing certain projects—and some of that pain lives on in me still.
Muse offers en route a brilliant
alternative history of modernism and of 20th
-century literature. "Real-life"
figures mingle with invented characters, particularly with, A. O. Outerbridge,
a kind of left-wing Ezra Pound, and Pepita Erskine, who registers as a
Sontag-figure crossed with Angela Davis. To what extent is
Muse also a
semi-clandestine work of literary criticism? Of cultural history?
There's a
certain tongue-in-cheek attempt at alternative history. I remember features in
Life as a boy: "If the South Had Won
the Civil War," etc., which always enthralled me. I decided to suppose
that Arnold Outerbridge was a hugely popular
Stalinist poet—which
is highly unlikely beyond the realm of alternative literary history—and
that Pepita Erskine, the wildly
popular and wildly controversial darling of the self-satisfied liberal
ascendancy, was African-American. Why not? This book is meant to be cheeky,
irreverent—about something I take utterly seriously. There certainly could—and
should—have been an Ida Perkins in our literature. We'd all be much better for
it.
Muse gives us two publishing lions-in-winter,
Homer Stern (whom many will read as resembling Roger Straus, co-founder of FSG)
and Sterling Wainwright (who shares certain features with New Directions
founder and publisher James Laughlin). Both men obsess about "the one that got
away"—the great publishing coup they missed. For Wainwright, it
's Lolita. For Homer, it's
Ida Perkins herself. Do you have an Ida Perkins?—the one that got away?
If I do—and I
have a number—I'm certainly not saying who they are. But all editors have
authors they admire whom they wish they'd been able to work with. You'd have to
be a block of stone not to. It's part of the game. As a young editor, I can
remember moping for weeks and weeks about losing certain projects—and some of
that pain lives on in me still. It's the worst kind of nostalgia, kind of
perverse, really: mourning something that never was. I'm sure there's a name
for it.
A good editor helps you to a better understanding of your book—your understanding, not his or hers.
Our hero, Paul
Dukach, is a young gay man arriving from the provinces to New York City in the
80s to attend NYU; he then enters the publishing world. There's an attentiveness to a range of
sexualities in the novel. To what extent is
Muse a queer book?
Without giving
away too much of the plot, let's just say that one of the things Paul learns to
appreciate in
Muse is that love keeps
happening to people in all sorts of surprising ways. Ida is someone who has
never been an observer of conventions—except maybe certain poetic ones. She's
had four husbands after all, and a long liaison with Arnold Outerbridge,
too. Homer and Sterling are likewise pleasure-seekers as well as seekers after
the word. And one of Ida's great poetic rivals, Elspeth Adams, is a lesbian,
though a closeted one—which was SOP in her day. But whether straight or gay,
Paul sees his heroes contend with eros in ways that very often don't fit onto
the conventional grid. One of the sub-themes of
Muse is the liberation of the gay but shackled Paul Dukach. Is that
queer? I hope so. Queerer than any single form of sexuality.
At
a certain moment
Paul observes of Sterling Wainwright's own poems: "Sterling's love poems were
generically idealizing, maybe even a little saccharine. Basically, Paul
thought, he was too nice." The book tacks interestingly between an admiration
for ruthlessness—in publishing as well as writing—and an ethic of care. Is
there a danger in being too nice? Another kind of danger in being, say, a
jackal?
The heroes and
heroines of
Muse don't "live at five
percent," as one of my other heroes Eugenio Montale says he did. They
reach out and grab life. Paul observes this with a certain baleful
appreciation, and as time goes on he finds ways of incorporating a modicum of
this sometimes selfish lust for experience into his own life. You're asking, I
think, if adherence to the Golden Mean,
aurea mediocritas, can
involve a kind of mediocrity. I'd say the jury's out on that—but Ida's
life and work represent freedom. And I do think that is art's ultimate value,
for us all.
Watch our interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of the international literary sensation, 'My Struggle':
There are beautiful
passages in
Muse
on the work of editing, the shepherding of authors and of books into print. Paul
is a great spokesman for the complex project of editing. What has it been like
for you, being edited as opposed to editing?
Robin Desser,
my editor, has been loveably relentless—always encouraging me toward greater
clarity, concision, consistency.
Muse
is a much better book because of her pushing me to refine and center it. I
don't think we necessarily see it entirely the same way—I think she is more of
a believer in realism than I am, for instance—but that tension forced me to
enhance the book's interior coherence, which made its comedic elements
stronger.
A good editor
helps you to a better understanding of your book—your understanding, not his or
hers. I tried to show this in the novel, and I've certainly experienced it with
Robin.
The hardest lesson of all for me at least was cutting. Cutting adjectives, cutting big words, cutting beautiful writing and even irrelevant portions of the book.
How
important was
your own experience as
an editor in writing this book, on a craft level?
Not surprisingly,
all the advice I've blithely given over decades was probably not as much help
to me as it should have been. I needed to hear it from someone else—in my case
from Robin Desser—and the hardest lesson of all for me at least was cutting.
Cutting adjectives, cutting big words, cutting beautiful writing and even
irrelevant portions of the book. You'd think I'd have known better—but doing is
different from observing. At least it was for me.
Muse, like your last book of poems Left-Handed, moves between country and city
and has a lovely disabused appreciation for both. Were you composing these
books simultaneously? How did they cross-pollinate?
No, I only
decided to try my hand at fiction after completing
Left-Handed, though I
think its poems do tell a story, which probably encouraged me in the direction
of fiction. I took it on as a challenge. Perhaps I thought I'd gone as far as I
could with the interior narrative my poems involved. It was time to write about
something more external. The city/country alternation reflects how I've lived
my life. I grew up in the country always wanting to be in the city, but as an
adult city-dweller I've found the country necessary and rejuvenating.
I
don'
t want to give
anything away, but there is a tremendous scene in
Muse set in Venice. What has Venice
meant to you?
I think I call
it "Disneyland for grownups" in the book. Venice is an overwhelming
confection of beauty, art, sensuality, and decadence, an entirely
unnatural environment, the ultimate aesthetic, or synaesthetic,
experience—which is also, unfortunately, no longer really alive. I know a woman
who held her funeral in advance in Venice, so she could be there for it. Ida
lives in Venice because it is an end of the Earth, a last outpost, but it's
also the ultimate cave of making. It had to be in the city of James, Sargent,
Proust, Mann, Diaghilev, Pound, and Brodsky, just for starters, that Paul comes
face to face with his idol and has her demolish his bookish, conventional ideas
about her. In the not-quite-real, oneiric world of
Muse, where else could this happen? And let's not forget that
Venice is the setting of
James's "The
Aspern Papers," in which the original "publishing scoundrel" plies his
underhanded trade.
Muse offers a fusion of your several
literary vocations: editor, poet, publisher, critic, translator, and now,
novelist. What of this alchemy? Can we expect further novels from you?
I'm afraid I've
gotten the bug and am working on something entirely different. The classic
second novel. It's now or never at my age, after all—but I also have no desire
to stop doing the things I've enjoyed so much. Everything I'm interested in
seems to more or less flow into everything else. Writing
Muse has
certainly made me more sympathetic to writers' vulnerabilities, but I think
what mattered most was learning that I myself (which is to say, anyone) could
take a shot at something I've always so admired and find that it isn't actually
magic. Giving oneself permission
to write, to do anything, is the fundamental thing. It involves a kind of
existential courage. When it emerges, anything can happen. I didn't follow any
conscious model in writing this little book. I hope I absorbed a few things
from the great writers I've had the good fortune to work with over the years—others
will judge how well.
Muse by Jonathan Galassi is out now from Knopf.
Maureen N. McLane's most recent book of
poems,
This Blue (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), was a finalist for the
National Book Award in Poetry.