Muse: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

of her fan base, who remained passionately loyal even as they themselves turned middle-aged.
    Paul knew it all, from Ida’s first tentative poems in the
Chestnut Hill Herbivore,
already pregnant with intimations of future significance, to the most exquisite Swiss plaquettes of the fifties and sixties, published in gilt-edged, snakeskin-bound editions of no more than twenty or thirty. While still in Hattersville he quietly became a—no,
the
—leading connoisseur of Perkinsiana; it was his secret hoard of adoration, the way model cars or baseball cards are for other kids. Paul let his classmates deify Magic Johnson and Kurt Cobain; his obsession with Ida Perkins made her his and his alone in a way no one who was flesh and blood ever could be. And he guarded his heroine jealously—though he couldn’t help crowing about some of his discoveries to Morgan, who was mind-boggled by his maniacal fixation on his one-and-only poet.
    “What did I start here? There
are
other writers, Paul,”she’d admonish him, rolling her eyes. “There’s Eliot, or Faulkner, or Stevens, or even the misunderstood Emily D. Hell, there’s even Arnold Outerbridge.”
    Paul would just shake his head. Every word of Ida’s was pure gold. No one else could come anywhere near her.
    Word slowly got out in scholarly circles that an oddball boy in Hattersville, New York, was the go- to guy about the elusive Ida, and over time Paul was inundated by bibliographical and biographical, even interpretive, queries from graduate students and eventually from established scholars of modernism. “What is all this strange mail you’re getting, Paul?” Grace Dukach would ask her son suspiciously, shrugging with incomprehension when he showed her the letters from English departments at Purdue and Baylor and Yale.
    He’d even had a less-than-pleasant exchange with Elliott Blossom, critical poobah and self-styled kingmaker among contemporary poets. Blossom had written in
The Covering Cherub
that the “cyclamen stains” in “Attis,” the central text in Ida’s incendiary 1970 collection,
Remove from the Right,
referred to blood spilled in the Vietnam War. Paul, though, had pointed out, in a letter to the editor of the
Cherub
that has since become cherished academic lore, that the phrase occurs twice elsewhere in her work: in the little-known early poem “Verga,” of 1943, and in “Nice Weather,” an uncollected prose text from the late fifties, where it describes apool of dried semen on her sleeping lover’s thigh (reputedly Harry Mathews’s). Blossom had withdrawn in high dudgeon and Paul understood that his chances for a university career had dwindled to almost nothing.
    Which was fine with him, because what he wanted, he’d come to understand, was to be involved with the writers of his own generation who were going to be Ida’s heirs, even if he couldn’t imagine being one of them himself. At Morgan’s urging, he’d gotten himself south to NYU (and NYC!) for college, where he unimaginatively majored in English, edited the literary magazine, and more or less lived in the Bobst Library on Washington Square. He landed a student job in the manuscript collection after classes and during summer vacations, and on his lunch breaks he haunted the Strand and the other used-book stores on Fourth Avenue, most of them soon to be killed off by the Internet.
    He’d also fallen under the spell of the rail-thin poet/critic Evan Halpern, whose view of Ida was more tempered than Paul’s, and who enjoyed winding him up about his obsession.
    “I’m afraid Ida Perkins doesn’t come within striking distance of Elspeth Adams, Paul,” Evan would attack, pitting Paul’s most beloved NYU teacher against his deepest admiration, and preparing for the barrage he knew would be forthcoming from his young disciple. “She has none of her finesse, none of her historical ballast.”
    “You’re just trying to get me riled,” Paul would volley back. “You know how I feel