Muse: A Novel (14 page)

“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, mutatis 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 Spartan
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 contracts 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 Hummock 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 Stockholm, and this year was no exception.