last best seller. I hear Wainwright spends all his time upstate. God, I wish he’d roll over so I could put my hand on Ida Perkins’s thigh.” Homer’s yawn exploded into a guffaw.
Paul got reciprocal static from Sterling.
“How’s Homer?” he’d ask Paul whenever they got together, his question anything but innocent. For Sterling, Homer epitomized everything that had gone wrong with publishing in the course of his career: loud, unlettered Homer was a merchandiser pure and simple, endlesslydumping worthless tripe on the market, like the rest of the big boys, to the detriment of Literature. He cut corners, lured away authors (from Sterling in particular) with promises he had no intention of keeping, and was disrespectful of Sterling’s sacrosanct authorial relationships, not to mention his vital contribution to the art of his time.
Worst of all, “I hear your boss has been sending importuning letters to Ida again,” Sterling would erupt, without a shred of evidence, as Paul would discover when he pushed for it. “Does he have
any
decency? Doesn’t he understand how embarrassing it is for Ida, having to turn him down year after year? Can’t you do something about it, Paul?”
Sterling’s misreading of Homer amused Paul, but it made him nervous, too. After all, he adored his wisecracking boss and the ramshackle enterprise he’d built, which was far more capable and dedicated to serious writing than Sterling would ever admit (the fact that he was so perennially exercised about Homer told Paul just how good Sterling knew Homer was). Besides, Homer paid Paul an unhandsome but more or less living wage, something Sterling could never have dreamed of doing.
Still, Paul couldn’t quite believe how much Sterling had seen and done in his long and eccentric life in letters. Unlike Homer, who
was
essentially an organization man, however idiosyncratic, and whose first commitment was to the institution he’d so carefully created and nursed, whatmattered most to Sterling was writing itself. He was a walking encyclopedia of authorial genius and malfeasance, too: the ineffable charm and unreliability of Andrei Abramovich; Marina Dello Gioio’s scandalous penchant for younger men; how that so-and-so So-and-So had made it impossible for him to publish Faulkner; why his Aunt Lobelia, who’d been his major benefactor early in his career, hadn’t let him publish
Lolita.
Every publisher Paul knew had a story about why someone else had prevented him from taking on the risky masterpiece that had turned out not to be risky at all. But Paul had learned over time that most publishers were haunted by the Ones That Got Away—usually thanks to their own blindness or chintziness or lack of nerve. They seemed to matter more than the ones they’d managed to snare.
As he unwound his thread during their evenings together, Sterling told Paul how he’d become a publisher at the behest of Arnold Outerbridge, when Sterling, an impetuous nineteen-year-old rich kid from Cincinnati, had decamped from the stultifying country club that was Princeton in the fall of 1946 and gone to sit at Outerbridge’s feet in war-ravaged London.
Steeped in the lore and poetry of classicism, A.O. had himself been bent as a young man on remaking stolid Edwardian literature into something with the chastity of his essential Greeks. The amazing thing was that he’d doneit—he and his older friends and enemies Pound, Eliot, H.D., Moore, Lawrence, and all the others. What came to be known as modernism had remade literature and the other arts once and for all. Where before you might have written, “My love is like a red, red rose” and more or less gotten away with it, suddenly there was serious talk about
scalloped
petals sacrificed on
granite
(Paul looked on in amazement as Sterling threw his head back and recited Hoda Avery’s “Scimitar,” one of her early
Paul got reciprocal static from Sterling.
“How’s Homer?” he’d ask Paul whenever they got together, his question anything but innocent. For Sterling, Homer epitomized everything that had gone wrong with publishing in the course of his career: loud, unlettered Homer was a merchandiser pure and simple, endlesslydumping worthless tripe on the market, like the rest of the big boys, to the detriment of Literature. He cut corners, lured away authors (from Sterling in particular) with promises he had no intention of keeping, and was disrespectful of Sterling’s sacrosanct authorial relationships, not to mention his vital contribution to the art of his time.
Worst of all, “I hear your boss has been sending importuning letters to Ida again,” Sterling would erupt, without a shred of evidence, as Paul would discover when he pushed for it. “Does he have
any
decency? Doesn’t he understand how embarrassing it is for Ida, having to turn him down year after year? Can’t you do something about it, Paul?”
Sterling’s misreading of Homer amused Paul, but it made him nervous, too. After all, he adored his wisecracking boss and the ramshackle enterprise he’d built, which was far more capable and dedicated to serious writing than Sterling would ever admit (the fact that he was so perennially exercised about Homer told Paul just how good Sterling knew Homer was). Besides, Homer paid Paul an unhandsome but more or less living wage, something Sterling could never have dreamed of doing.
Still, Paul couldn’t quite believe how much Sterling had seen and done in his long and eccentric life in letters. Unlike Homer, who
was
essentially an organization man, however idiosyncratic, and whose first commitment was to the institution he’d so carefully created and nursed, whatmattered most to Sterling was writing itself. He was a walking encyclopedia of authorial genius and malfeasance, too: the ineffable charm and unreliability of Andrei Abramovich; Marina Dello Gioio’s scandalous penchant for younger men; how that so-and-so So-and-So had made it impossible for him to publish Faulkner; why his Aunt Lobelia, who’d been his major benefactor early in his career, hadn’t let him publish
Lolita.
Every publisher Paul knew had a story about why someone else had prevented him from taking on the risky masterpiece that had turned out not to be risky at all. But Paul had learned over time that most publishers were haunted by the Ones That Got Away—usually thanks to their own blindness or chintziness or lack of nerve. They seemed to matter more than the ones they’d managed to snare.
As he unwound his thread during their evenings together, Sterling told Paul how he’d become a publisher at the behest of Arnold Outerbridge, when Sterling, an impetuous nineteen-year-old rich kid from Cincinnati, had decamped from the stultifying country club that was Princeton in the fall of 1946 and gone to sit at Outerbridge’s feet in war-ravaged London.
Steeped in the lore and poetry of classicism, A.O. had himself been bent as a young man on remaking stolid Edwardian literature into something with the chastity of his essential Greeks. The amazing thing was that he’d doneit—he and his older friends and enemies Pound, Eliot, H.D., Moore, Lawrence, and all the others. What came to be known as modernism had remade literature and the other arts once and for all. Where before you might have written, “My love is like a red, red rose” and more or less gotten away with it, suddenly there was serious talk about
scalloped
petals sacrificed on
granite
(Paul looked on in amazement as Sterling threw his head back and recited Hoda Avery’s “Scimitar,” one of her early
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