Jonathan Galassi's 'Muse' Is a Send-Up of the Publishing World from the Inside

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 the April issue of the magazine.) 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.