11:28 Sra. Lorenzetti
12:45 fuori
15:30 home — long lunch
16:29 Sterling call
18:40 bath
19:30 Moro cocktails
21:00 dinner
22:59 bed — red room
24 APRIL 1986
8:29 caffè, cornetto
9:09 shoemaker
11:19 plumber
14:30 Giannotti …
The entries went on inexorably this way, covering roughly the last five years of A.O.’s life — before dementia seemed to leave him entirely incoherent, that is, though his daily jottings had continued even then. In the last notebook the scribbling became wilder, less concise and organized. The diary entries ceased and all that was left were chains of words, which could go on for pages:
upheaval heavy medieval bevy retrieval seawall scorch
levee steady level conundrum grief set piece
alstroemeria astronomy aphid Arthurian unstable unspeakable
table unable
roadway goldenrod icebox forehead footsteps possess embrace
No poems, no revelations or confessions. Just lists of appointments interspersed with strings of seemingly random words. And Ida’s name, in various permutations, in and out of code, repeated over and over.
Arnold’s notebooks remained opaque. Whatever meaning they held was locked inside them, maybe forever. Paul had succeeded in unscrambling their code, perhaps — or were these supposed diary entries a cipher of their own, with yet another layer of secrets beneath them? Their writer’s deeper imperative, the one that had determined the words on the pages, remained unfathomed.
Paul had been working his way through the old accordion file he’d found with the notebooks, too. It wasn’t just clippings, it turned out, but carbons of correspondence to and from Impetus and others concerning both A.O. and Ida — bills, letters from Sterling to both of them, along with some answers from Arnold — though, of course, nothing from her. Reading them was like watching Ida’s fame balloon.
It was the publication of Bringing Up the Rear in 1954 that had signaled her emergence from the chrysalis of cultdom into public fame. Even the aging Wallace Stevens had written Sterling to say, “She gives me hope for our future.” Her kinsman Robert Lowell, only eight years Ida’s senior, who’d also had a stellar career early on, winning the Pulitzer Prize when he was barely thirty, had watched her speed by him like a literary Road Runner. Still, he couldn’t help but praise the “brilliance, finish, and freedom” of Ida’s work in his Sewanee Review review of Bringing Up the Rear. Ida was a Brahmin, too, every bit as much as Cal; but she had none of the self-protective entitlement he’d had to work so assiduously to shed; it just slid off her back like rainwater. Lowell could only look on in stunned confusion.
Then there was a July 23, 1960, letter to Sterling from the manager of the Chelsea Hotel, enclosing a bill for almost $12,000:
Miss Ida Perkins and her coterie left hurriedly this morning after more than a month here at the Chelsea without settling their account. As she provided your name in case of emergencies, I am sending it on to you for satisfaction.
Or this one, from Sterling to A.O., dated February 28, 1970:
Dearest Arnold:
My spies tell me the powder at the Summit is peerless this season, but I haven’t been able to get away, largely due to the run on Ida’s work. We’ve reprinted Half a Heart thirteen times since the National Book Award, and my salesmen tell me the stores can’t keep it on the shelves. And all of her work is going gangbusters. E. S. Wilentz collared me in front of his shop on Eighth Street this morning and wouldn’t stop chanting, “SEND. ME. MORE. BOOKS.” It was embarrassing — and sublime. Of course we don’t have books to send him at the moment, but the printer promised another twenty thousand next week. Twenty thousand! Our cynical old sales manager Sidney Huntoon says it’ll be “Gone today, here tomorrow,” once the excitement dies down, but in Ida’s case, I don’t think so for once. The old girl is the absolute toast of the town. You should have seen her on Dick Cavett, making eyes and getting him to laugh uproariously. And her show with Audrey Dienstfrey and Her Kind was a sellout at Boston Garden. Audrey screamed and wept and made an enormous scene — envious, no doubt — but now they’re joined at the hip and Audrey won’t let her new soul sister out of her sight.
You’d be proud of your consort. I certainly am. We’re minting money, for once. Ida seems to be enjoying it all — at least most of it; I don’t think she’s wild about being mobbed in the street. Luckily, she’s coming up to the farm for the weekend to hide out, bringing that ingrate Hummock and maybe young John Ashbery along. Yawn. Maxine has orga nized a little golf tourney for everyone that ought to be a riot, since most of the guests aren’t exactly star athletes.
In other news, I’m sorry to report that we’re going to have to let Elegy for Evgenia go out of stock for the time being, as demand has fallen below the acceptable threshold for a reprint. Here’s hoping the situation turns around shortly.
I trust all is otherwise serene in La Serenissima. Keep the faith; we’re holding on as usual here.
Ever thine,
There were ecstatic reviews and the inevitable pans, particularly of Barricade and The Brownouts, published in Ida’s so-called Anti phase. There were endless award citations: four National Book Awards (and a photograph of Ida arm in arm with fellow winners Joyce Carol Oates and William Steig at the awards dinner in 1992); two Pulitzer Prizes; the Feltrinelli, Lenin, Nonino, Prince of Asturias, Jerusalem, and T. S. Eliot prizes; the gold medal for poetry of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; a letter from 41 offering Ida the Presidential Medal of Freedom (with a carbon of a reply from Sterling politely declining on her behalf); a list of thirty-nine honorary degrees, from 1960 to 2005; copies of full-page advertisements for various titles; articles in Flair and Vogue about her idiosyncratic fashion sense; bills from Bergdorf Goodman for thousands of dollars, primarily for shoes; travel agents’ invoices from the triumphal 1967 West Coast tour, during which Ida had cavorted naked in the big pool at Esalen with Pepita Erskine, after spending the weekend in Watts with Eldridge Cleaver. A photo of sunburned, shirtless Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell flanking a pale, straw-hatted Ida, taken by Elizabeth Hardwick on Mount Desert Island in August 1968, two days after the New York Post printed the iconic shot of Ida in a Chanel suit with matching spectator pumps and alligator bag outside La Côte Basque with Babe Paley and Truman Capote (“Whose Hair Higher?” the caption queried). Invitations to twelve state dinners at the White House, from the Johnson to Obama administrations. A royalty statement for Aria di Giudecca (7,238 copies sold in the first six months of 2000).
And there was this, from 1964:
Dear Mr. Wainwright:
I want to thank you for sending Ida Perkins’s new book, The Face-lift Wars, which I have been nibbling at with great fascination since its arrival. Miss Perkins is that unlikely miracle, a Real Thing. Gertrude Stein, who as you know encouraged Ida when she was still a girl, would have been gratified to see how she has panned out.