Authors were to Homer what paintings or real estate or jewelry were to his richer relations: living, breathing collectibles, outward and visible signs of his inward and spiritual substance. To publish Ida would in some sense be the capstone of his career, more even than Pepita, or the Three Aces, or Hart, Schaffner, and Marx, because he already owned, or had owned, all of them at one point or another, even if some had eventually managed to pry themselves loose. But Ida was the one he hadn’t managed to bag, as he graciously put it. She belonged to his gnat of a rival Sterling Wainwright, who was related to her, after all, and for Homer too, blood mattered. There was simply nothing he could do about it — not that he hadn’t made one frontal assault after another, only to be genteelly put off time and again. No, Ida was Homer’s bird in the bush. And it rankled like an unscratched itch.
“Fucking Ida Perkins gets all the headlines and wins all the prizes, and what do we get? Bupkis!” he’d grumble, as if it was their fault, to Georges Savoy and anyone else he could buttonhole on his editorial staff, a raggle-taggle gatherum of talented misfits, many of whom he’d scooped up “on the beach,” always at a considerable discount, after they’d been let go by more hard-nosed mainstream houses — starting with Frank and Georges. Each had succumbed to Homer’s spell in one way or another: portly Paddy Femor, an exceptionally gifted editor whose perfectionism made it nearly impossible for him to let go of the manuscripts he noodled over, sometimes for years; cadaverous Elsa Pogorsky, known around the office as Morticia, invariably dressed in black from head to toe and forever scowling through forbidding black glasses, one of Homer’s “nuns of publishing,” who sat resentfully at her desk all day correcting the numberless translations of unsalable story writers and poets from the “other” Europe that Abe Burack and others were constantly pressing on Homer; crotchety, heart-of-gold copy chief Esperanza Esparza, renowned for her way with a red pencil, who seemed never to leave her desk surrounded by its array of scraggly avocado and spider plants that leached all the available light from her grimy office window.
Homer’s team was united in subservient loyalty to their larger-than-life leader, whose paternal insouciance made them feel sunned-on for once in their lives: essential players in an enterprise of unquestionable significance. His allegro benevolence was like catnip. Why, it was nearly as good as money! So they beavered away while he sat back with his feet on his desk like an overdressed Tom Sawyer, smiling his toothy smile and entertaining himself placing troublemaking calls to agents and journalists.
“Who do I have to blow to get Burack’s new book reviewed, baby?” he’d jaw to his sidekick Florian Brundage, affectionately known as Chowderhead, The Daily Blade’s chief book critic and, perhaps not entirely incidentally, a P & S novelist, picking his teeth all the while. “Your piece on that cow I’m too refined to mention, Hortense Houlihan”—to tell the truth, Homer made use of a coarser, unprintable epithet—“was shit and you know it.”
Miraculously, books emerged from P & S’s Augean stables. Usually they won kudos, often they won prizes, and now and again they sold reasonably well. Sometimes working for Homer was peaches and cream, occasionally it was infuriating, but mostly it was kind of fun. All you had to do was accept that it was Homer’s shop, 100 percent. There were no office politics at P & S, because he decided everything. So people — those who lasted — relaxed and homed in on their work, endlessly complaining about the peremptory, ungrateful, self-involved authors whose writing they idolized. They were utterly mad, of course, but they did their level best to ignore one another’s foibles since they were the same as their own. And to many of them the cramped, filthy offices on Union Square were a mind-bending, topsy-turvy little heaven on earth.
II. The Ingénue
No one, it seemed, was more in sync with Homer in his later years — with the clear exception of his longtime assistant and partner in crime, the regal Sally Savarin, uncrowned queen of the company — than Paul Dukach, the latest in the long line of editors in chief, who in the eyes of many had emerged as Homer’s heir apparent.
Being number two at P & S had historically been a dangerous proposition. You couldn’t win. If you were too deferential, Homer walked all over you and sooner or later lost respect for you and fired you. But if you felt the need to demonstrate your cojones — if you implied, for instance, that Eric Nielsen was “your” author — you were dead meat in a different way. Homer at the office was more than a little like Henry VIII, or maybe it was Joseph Stalin. “It’s time for a change” was one of his most familiar and most dreaded nostrums, and publishing was littered with talented individuals who’d gotten the ax simply because they’d clashed with the boss. In the long run most men couldn’t tolerate Homer’s alpha male need to dominate; consequently, the majority of his employees were on the distaff side (the rock-bottom wages he paid could have had something to do with it, too). Homer might have thought of them as his complaisant harem, when he thought of them at all.
He was older now, though, and no longer had the same energy to stomp on the competition both inside the company and out as he once had. Paul Dukach had lucked into a sweet spot at P & S. He was unthreatening enough—“ductile” was the term one of his shrewder authors had used — that Homer could let his guard down and allow the younger man to explore his own independent editorial interests without feeling mortally threatened. To everyone’s surprise, maybe Homer’s most of all, they got along.
“We need to shake things up around here, Dukach,” Homer would say on a Monday morning, when his vital signs were particularly healthy after a restorative weekend in the country. “It’s time for a change. I think you should let Kenneally go.”
Paul had recently promoted Daisy Kenneally to editor after three grueling years as his assistant, and the first book she’d acquired on her own, about the Cleveland Browns — admittedly an unusual offering for P & S; and where else in publishing would the in-house sports aficionado be a girl? — had been a surprise best seller. Out of envy, perhaps (or was it pure perversity?), Homer had unaccountably taken against her.
“I don’t think we can do that, Homer,” Paul would respond, as flatly as he could. “She’s the most productive young editor we have.”
“I think her books are thin soup. How did that novel by what’s her name, Fran Drescher, do?” Homer was incorrigibly terrible with names.
“If you’re referring to Nita Desser’s Plankton, it did all right,” Paul allowed, resorting to the euphemism that everyone knew meant a book had been a small, or large, disappointment.