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The Fiction Issue 2015

Famed Publisher Jonathan Galassi Talks FSG, Inspiration, and Fiction

The longtime editor's first novel, "Muse," is both a satire of the publishing industry and a examination of the tangled bonds of family.

This article appears in the June 2015 Fiction Issue of VICE Magazine.

In 1986 a young editor and poet named Jonathan Galassi went to work at the venerable publishing house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Founded in 1946 by the fascinating, theatrical Roger W. Straus Jr., the small house with the big reputation has published a number of Nobel Prize–winning poets—Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney—in addition to novelists and essayists Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Jamaica Kincaid, Ian Frazier, and John McPhee—writers who have not only enriched the language but turned form around. Prior to his appointment at FSG, the Harvard-educated Galassi studied with the poet Elizabeth Bishop and, in short order, became Italian poet Eugenio Montale's definitive English translator. For ten years Galassi was the poetry editor of the Paris Review while he worked on his own verse, which resulted in three volumes: Morning Run (1988), North Street (2000), and Left-handed (2012). It was the last book that announced a new kind of writer: visceral, immediate, acute, and isolated in his vulnerability. Still, Galassi was known primarily as an editor, and, with Straus's death in 2004, he became the president and publisher of the company that has been his professional home for nearly 30 years. This month Galassi made himself known in a different way: Knopf published his first novel, Muse. The story of a romantic young editor who becomes the protégé of a flamboyant publisher and his professional and private rival, the book is a satire about a world its author knows well; it's also an examination of family, and what drives us to re-create those tangled necessary bonds inside and outside the home. I spoke to the 65-year-old Galassi this past spring at his corner table at Union Square Cafe, where, on most days, he lunches with authors and other publishing-related friends and colleagues in a relaxed, expansive manner.

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VICE: How did writing your first novel start happening for you?
Jonathan Galassi: I had never thought I had the chops to write fiction, but a few years ago I decided if I was going to fool around with it, this was the time to do it. I backed into it just the way I've backed into everything in my life. If I wasn't going to do it now, it would never happen. What did I have to lose by trying?

How did Muse come to you? Bits and pieces?
It must have. I really don't know; I started it out by writing vignettes, one day one summer. I wrote them without rereading them, and then I put them away for a year.

Was it always in the third person?
It was. I am trying to write something now in the first person. It's very different. But Muse started as something like third-person memoir, if there is such a thing.

Was Ida, the poet at the heart of Muse, based on someone? She feels really invented to me.
No, the same with Morgan Dickerman, the bookseller who is our hero's conscience, as it were. Those are really invented characters.

By the middle of the book you really understand that Paul, the ingenue editor, is in love with two fathers. And he was very careful not to blame either of them for their faults. The descriptions of their limitations are of someone who's evolved, and their limitations really are the same, which are the limitations of charisma. They're completely charismatic in different ways. They're a bunch of outsiders who find each other, not least the narrator.
Young Paul definitely wants to get in this world. When you're outside, the world always looks enticing; once you're in, you see the cracks and the stains.

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But they all want to belong to something, right? Why do you think Sterling loves the young guy?
Because he needs someone to admire him, a narcissistic mirror. Sterling is heroic, admirable. But he basks in the appreciation of a younger person who thinks what he's done was the bee's knees, and there probably aren't a lot of people like that, such true believers.

You said you put it away for a year. It stayed in your head, obviously?
Yes, but I actually didn't think too much about it because too much else was going on. Then, that next summer, I said, "I'm going to pull it out and see if there's something there." Then I started constructing a story and building it out. It's a short book.

I think that there's something very kind about the book. There's a great sensitivity to it. Tell me a little bit more about the process of writing. Was it a two-year period?
I started it in 2011, and I finished it about a year ago. So three years.

What was it like for you with your day job?
I didn't work on it during the week very much. I think I learned a few things about myself in the process of writing. I was very reluctant to let go of things, but that's the absolute key: cutting things out. I have a sort of anal-retentive approach to writing that I needed help with. It's a satire that metamorphoses into something else. And it is a love story. I kept adding layers to it—but I needed to subtract too.

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The only really responsible person in it is Paul because he takes his friendships very seriously. I laughed so hard over the Brodsky and Susan Sontag characters.
Let's just say many of the writers in the book share characteristics with writers I've known.

I love all the characters based on writers I've read.
The book aims to re-create the atmosphere of family life in an old-fashioned independent literary publishing house. At Purcell & Stern there is Daddy, Homer Stern, and then there are all the visiting cousins, the writers. And then there are the worker bees who do all the work and sometimes get squashed in the process.

A lot of men earlier in Homer's career hadn't survived in Homer's family. He couldn't tolerate too much competition. But Muse takes place at a later stage in Homer's life when he needs help and Paul isn't interested in challenging him that directly. Paul is looking for a father figure. As you said, he finds himself sort of in between these two men, Homer and his nemesis, Sterling Wainwright, who represent two different aspects of the same thing.

Paul's love life goes on at a slow simmer: He has feelings for other guys that are never really developed, never truly tested. He hasn't grown up in a way. There's a delayed-adolescent quality to him.

One of the things I loved about him was his optimism.
That's one of the reasons he is drawn to these worldly, not to say cynical, people: He's living his life vicariously through them. Paul eventually grows up in the course of the book. He finally sees that Ida isn't quite what he thought she was, but she's still great in a different and perhaps an even deeper way.

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She's a limited person like all of us.
Exactly. His seeing that represents his growing up. He sees that his ideas about art and life are bookish. I hope you feel at the end of the book that there's hope for Paul: that he's going to find a different kind of love.

I don't think he's arrested at all; I think he's a romantic. And I think Morgan was such a good foil for him because you can hear her eye roll as she listens to him on the phone, and she is a great character and a necessary character. She's a full person. The thing that I love about Paul is that his imagination is always trying to make people whole, but the writing shows their limitations. You're torn between his romanticism and the reality of who these people are.
You're supposed to get the sense that Homer has come on to Morgan sometime in the past. There's a sense that she's had to fend him off. But she didn't take offense; that's just who he was.

Did you feel that you were in conversation with other writers that you loved? Were there writers in particular that you wished you could talk to about it?
I felt I was really swimming in lone waters, but I'm sure that was a self-protective illusion. I do think that lots of novels by poets aren't really very dimensionally realized, and I hoped to do better in this respect at least.

Poets know about compression. They don't know about expansion and drama.
Take James Merrill's novels. I did think about those, and I was hoping I could write something a bit more filled out than those. I love Merrill's poetry, but I wanted to challenge myself to write a novel about poets and poetry that was a novel.

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I was meaning to ask you what you edited out.
There was a whole part about Paul's love life, when he goes online and meets people. It's funny, I don't remember how that was supposed to fit into the plot, but Robin Desser, my terrific editor, said, "Take this out, please!" [Laughs.] So I did. Robin's drive in editing the book was always to make it more realistic. It's not quite a realistic book, but that push from her helped me give it more contour.

There's nothing like a good editor. You have to be selfless to do the job.

She edited it four times. I've never seen anything like it. She was always digging, sometimes very annoyingly. [Laughs.] For me, anyway, having an editor whose vision of the book was slightly more down-to-earth than mine was very salutary for me, in tying the book to reality.

I also thought that you could write a play. Your dialogue was so good. Poets are always good at the theater.
I've always wanted to write a musical. Larry Kramer tried to get me to write one. I did some lyrics, and he was very kind about them.

This book and the poetry are real comings-out.
He sent them to Elton John, actually, but he didn't think much of them. [Laughs.]

Who did you end up loving most in the book? I love Sterling.
I know you love Sterling!

I think he reminds me of John Lindsay. When I was reading him I visualized John Lindsay, with this patrician lack of chaos that he projects. Homer is all chaos. Sterling is kind of like Apollo in a weird way, very rational. That's because, in some way, his wildness is confined to his art, which is not very good. Homer doesn't have that outlet—he's just an id.
Homer is all id. That's true. He's all appetite 24/7. That's what makes him a good publisher. He's ravenous. Whereas Sterling is more Olympian, more Apollonian. I'm so glad you liked him. I love him. I felt kind of guilty killing him off. [Laughs.]

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Why?
Paul kills off both his fathers. I did that on purpose; it's supposed to be funny. But, you know, there's guilt involved.

There's always guilt involved.
If Ida is Paul's literary mother, then his mother basically gets him to kill his father. And she has her own reasons, as you find out later. It's a very Oedipal story, actually.

I felt a little queasy. But I felt it was necessary and important.
I don't know where that came from.

But that's what's great about fiction—you don't have to know where it comes from. The limits of nonfiction mean you're
jealous of poets. You never ask a poet if it's true or not—it just is. That's one of the things I loved about the book. It doesn't really matter to people who don't know anything about publishing.
I hope not, because it's a story about the family, romance, and love.

Tell me what's going on now.
I am working on another novel that I can't talk about that's totally different. I am trying to do it in the first person. I would say this is about a character in a different phase of life than Paul. I've been writing all my life, but I've recently found that letting myself try these bigger, looser things is really fun and rewarding.