Read Online Muse: A Novel by Jonathan Galassi - Free Book Online
Authors: Jonathan Galassi
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politics as retrograde and myopic, while Joe McCarthy went after him from the right. Sterling was valiant in presenting and defending Outerbridge’s later work—admittedly not as strong as his heroic period—but A.O. quickly fell out of fashion in the frightened Cold War West of Eisenhower and Eden.
By the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, which A.O. publicly deplored, his career in the States—and in Britain, too—was effectively over. Even in Russia, where he had been made an honorary citizen, the post-Stalinist thaw meant that Outerbridge’s work went into decline under Khrushchev, and the invitations, awards, and emoluments dried up. For a while, Arnold wandered. Always writing, always it seemed with a new woman, he lived for several years on Minorca, almost within swimming distance of his old antagonist Robert Graves, and later in a remote village on the Greek island of Paros, with Svetlana, now marriedto a British banker, and their three boys in occasional attendance.
A.O. spent his declining years in Venice, holed up in the apartment overlooking his old flame Celine Mannheim’s garden. It was there, in the fall of 1969, that he encountered Ida Perkins again (they’d had a brief affair in London in the late fifties), at a dinner for none other than Homer Stern, who was visiting his cousin. Soon Arnold and Ida were living together, and she was to care for him devotedly for the next twenty years, till he died of emphysema on October 25, 1989, at the age of eighty-four.
Sterling admitted that when he’d first come to Outerbridge in London for advice, Arnold had not been encouraging about the young Princetonian’s forays into verse. “You’ll never make it as a poet, Sterl,” he’d drawled. “Go home and do something useful—like starting a publishing house. We need you.” Crestfallen, then inspired, Sterling had spent a few months skiing and canoodling in Gstaad before wending his way home on the
Queen Mary.
Less than two years later, Impetus Editions, set up in the old farmer’s cottage on his aunt Lobelia Delano’s estate in Hiram’s Corners, New York, a hundred miles north of the city, was a going concern.
“Impotent Editions,” Outerbridge called it when he was annoyed with Sterling, which turned out to be often overthe next forty years. He hadn’t conceived that Sterling, beyond being loyal and well-heeled, might actually have a mind and sensibility of his own. But Impetus soon became anything but a rich man’s plaything. Sterling had been tight with a dollar, he acknowledged, but liberal in his encouragement of writing that he thought mattered and the writers who created it, and over not too many years, his fledgling house had developed from a congeries of Outerbridge acolytes into a small, selective organ of the left-leaning branch of late modernism (as opposed to the by-then-incarcerated Pound’s and the apotheosized Eliot’s rightward-tilting brand) that came to be known as the Movement.
Paul was convinced that no one had done more to ensure the health of what became a vital alternative strain in American literature than Sterling Wainwright in his heyday. After all, Byron Hummock, the showiest of the trendsetting postwar Jewish American writers, had published his first book of stories with Sterling, as had April Owens her now-classic anti-O’Neillian dramas of modern Greek love and politics, and Jorge Metzl his groundbreaking journalism about West Africa. Sterling’s Impetus New Poets also introduced and stayed loyal to most of the second- and third-generation modernists. Only Pound and his disciple Laughlin, with his comparatively staid Nude Erections, as Pound had dubbed it, established a decade earlier not thirty miles east inConnecticut’s Northwest Corner, could hold a candle to the impetus that Outerbridge and Wainwright together had given to the Movement Moment.
And Sterling had evolved, too. From being a gawky, sex-obsessed, very tall rich young man, he grew into
By the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, which A.O. publicly deplored, his career in the States—and in Britain, too—was effectively over. Even in Russia, where he had been made an honorary citizen, the post-Stalinist thaw meant that Outerbridge’s work went into decline under Khrushchev, and the invitations, awards, and emoluments dried up. For a while, Arnold wandered. Always writing, always it seemed with a new woman, he lived for several years on Minorca, almost within swimming distance of his old antagonist Robert Graves, and later in a remote village on the Greek island of Paros, with Svetlana, now marriedto a British banker, and their three boys in occasional attendance.
A.O. spent his declining years in Venice, holed up in the apartment overlooking his old flame Celine Mannheim’s garden. It was there, in the fall of 1969, that he encountered Ida Perkins again (they’d had a brief affair in London in the late fifties), at a dinner for none other than Homer Stern, who was visiting his cousin. Soon Arnold and Ida were living together, and she was to care for him devotedly for the next twenty years, till he died of emphysema on October 25, 1989, at the age of eighty-four.
Sterling admitted that when he’d first come to Outerbridge in London for advice, Arnold had not been encouraging about the young Princetonian’s forays into verse. “You’ll never make it as a poet, Sterl,” he’d drawled. “Go home and do something useful—like starting a publishing house. We need you.” Crestfallen, then inspired, Sterling had spent a few months skiing and canoodling in Gstaad before wending his way home on the
Queen Mary.
Less than two years later, Impetus Editions, set up in the old farmer’s cottage on his aunt Lobelia Delano’s estate in Hiram’s Corners, New York, a hundred miles north of the city, was a going concern.
“Impotent Editions,” Outerbridge called it when he was annoyed with Sterling, which turned out to be often overthe next forty years. He hadn’t conceived that Sterling, beyond being loyal and well-heeled, might actually have a mind and sensibility of his own. But Impetus soon became anything but a rich man’s plaything. Sterling had been tight with a dollar, he acknowledged, but liberal in his encouragement of writing that he thought mattered and the writers who created it, and over not too many years, his fledgling house had developed from a congeries of Outerbridge acolytes into a small, selective organ of the left-leaning branch of late modernism (as opposed to the by-then-incarcerated Pound’s and the apotheosized Eliot’s rightward-tilting brand) that came to be known as the Movement.
Paul was convinced that no one had done more to ensure the health of what became a vital alternative strain in American literature than Sterling Wainwright in his heyday. After all, Byron Hummock, the showiest of the trendsetting postwar Jewish American writers, had published his first book of stories with Sterling, as had April Owens her now-classic anti-O’Neillian dramas of modern Greek love and politics, and Jorge Metzl his groundbreaking journalism about West Africa. Sterling’s Impetus New Poets also introduced and stayed loyal to most of the second- and third-generation modernists. Only Pound and his disciple Laughlin, with his comparatively staid Nude Erections, as Pound had dubbed it, established a decade earlier not thirty miles east inConnecticut’s Northwest Corner, could hold a candle to the impetus that Outerbridge and Wainwright together had given to the Movement Moment.
And Sterling had evolved, too. From being a gawky, sex-obsessed, very tall rich young man, he grew into
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