Paul remembered a luncheon Homer had given years ago at the Thespian Brotherhood, a temple to bygone theatrical greatness on Madison Square. The occasion had been the publication of a group biography of the Wintons, arguably the most distinguished artistic/intellectual family in American history, who could lay claim to having produced America’s first great sculptor, her leading naturalist, and her first internationally acclaimed lyric soprano, all in one generation. The Winton descendants, though, turned out to be a raggle-taggle bunch of dipsomaniac WASPs from the back of beyond whom Paul couldn’t imagine being familiar with, let alone understanding, their famous forebears’ achievements. So much for genetics. Genius, it seemed, struck like lightning and moved on, leaving befuddlement and disarray in its wake. It didn’t tend to deposit a residue in the following generations the way egregious beauty or physical prowess, not to mention wealth, sometimes could, but scattered its glory willy-nilly. Which was why Paul set no stock in ancestry, Homer’s or Sterling’s or his own. Who cared who your grandfather was, in the end? It was not where or who you came from but what you did with your own grab bag of advantages and disadvantages that made you remarkable. He’d learned early on in his work that the real writers hadn’t gone to Yale or Oxford; they came from everywhere — or nowhere — and their determination to dig down, to matter, whatever the odds against them, was the only key to their succeeding. For every Ida who had been to the manner born, there were ten — no, twenty — Arnolds and Ezras and Pepitas, youngsters from the provinces determined to make their mark by dint of their own talent and hunger and grit. And Ida and Sterling had been no different. They’d been just as eager to escape their own stifling, if well-padded, backgrounds, to break away that ecstatic summer in Otter Creek, to leave behind where they’d come from and become who they aspired to be.
Nothing was more democratic than talent. And nothing was more threatening to families, be they rich or poor, or consequently more despised and feared.
Here, too, in the academy’s ice-cold auditorium, while the speakers droned on, accurately enough, about Ida’s Enduring Significance, Paul felt something was missing. It was all heartfelt, all true as far as it went, but the encomia failed to catch the essence of the living, breathing person he’d been privileged to share an afternoon with — and whom others here had known intimately. Ida wasn’t here, in body or spirit — except when she was quoted. And then she came miraculously to life.
That was the thing. Ida was her work now. Her life in the world had ceased to matter, except to those who’d been touched, or wounded, by her. Her significance had transmuted into something lodged in her words. They’d grown out of the substrate of her life, just as she herself had derived from Delanos and Perkinses and Severances and Wainwrights, but they’d detached from their source and become autonomous. “Tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change,” Mallarmé had put it: the future was going to refine, to redefine, Ida’s nature in a way mere life never could; it would anneal her to her essence, such as it greatly, or even maybe not greatly, was — though Paul was as sure of her work’s enduring value as he was of anything. Time would tell. The process was already under way, and it was beyond anyone’s power — hers or Sterling’s or Homer’s or Elliott Blossom’s, or his, for that matter — to determine or even influence her fate. Along with all the other words Ida had written, the poems of Mnemosyne would have a life of their own. It was Paul’s job to get out of the way, whatever the consequences. He had spent the weeks since Ida’s death wrestling with what he should do about her book. Now, at last, he thought he saw the way forward.
When Sterling’s turn came, he spoke without notes. He leaned over the podium and gazed into the packed, drafty hall, his glasses sliding disarmingly down his long nose.
“Cousin Ida was one of the lights of our house and the glories of our literature. She was named for my grandmother, like my daughter, but we shared much more, thanks in part to her loyalty to the noble and unjustly maligned Arnold Outerbridge. The freshness of her poems, the depth and strength of feeling they embody, their miraculous, sometimes shocking honesty worked wonders on the readers, and the other writers, of her time. Lionel Trilling once referred to Robert Frost as ‘a terrifying poet’—a tremendous compliment. Ida by contrast was a poet who inspired reverence and love, for the brilliance but even more for the humanity of her knowledge — not only of the fundamental properties of our language and our complex and contradictory history but, most important, of our unpredictable human natures — qualities of the woman herself now fixed forever in her immortal poetry.
“All the forces that play on human beings were at work in and on Ida. This, I think, is the secret of her astounding popularity with everyone, from Brother Elliott Blossom, who is here with us in the front row, to the Common Reader out there in the wide world. Ida was the Common Writer in a way that was and is and ever shall be entirely her own. She is Walt and Emily and Herman and Tom and Wallace and Hilda and Gertrude all rolled into one. We shall never see her like again.”
Blossom spoke, too, at mind-numbing length, and Pepita Erskine, to Paul’s surprise, recalling her time with Ida at Esalen in the sixties. W. S. Merwin represented Ida’s younger poet-peers and Abe Burack the prose writers, and Evan Halpern, now miraculously converted to unstinting approval of Paul’s goddess, the critics; last of all was Alan Glanville, the rising young Stanford scholar whom Sterling had just commissioned to write Ida’s biography.
Homer, never one for solemnities, left as soon as he decently could, but Paul stayed to the bitter end (the speechifying went on for an excruciating two and a half hours).
At the reception afterward in the upstairs gallery lined with anodyne paintings by the academy’s artist members, he finally approached Sterling.
“Well, hello, Paul. Long time no see. How’s Homer?”
“Very well. He was here, but he had to leave. Your remarks were beautiful; perfect, I thought.”
“Ida and I had a very strong connection, you know. A profound bond,” he drawled. Paul could tell he’d said it a thousand times on as many campuses. Paul was having a hard time picking up on what Sterling was feeling, not that it was ever all that easy to tell. He wasn’t a WASP for nothing. “Thanks for your letter,” he added, referring to the condolence note Paul had written him about Ida.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been more in touch. Things have been insanely busy at work. As a matter of fact, though, there’s something I need to talk to you about that came up in Venice. May I call you tomorrow?”
“Please do.” Sterling raised his left eyebrow quizzically in a characteristic gesture of — what? “I’ll be up at the farm.”
Sterling was tackled by Angelica Blauner, the painter, who had been the second wife of his chum the translator and poet Oswald Fessenden. Paul chatted nonsensically for another hour with Blossom and Glanville and Sterling’s daughter, Ida Bernstein, “Ida B,” as he’d come to think of her. He introduced himself to Count Moro, but the man, who was out of his element in English, only nodded vaguely, clearly unaware of Paul’s involvement with Ida or her book.
He also managed to stay on the other side of the room from Roz Horowitz. How was he going to explain things to Roz? She had been Ida’s loyal agent for decades, one of the first to take on a poet as a client. Why had Ida left her out of the picture? Mnemosyne was bound to be a colossal hit. Roz was not going to take kindly to being cut out of the excitement, not to mention her 10—or was it 15?—percent.