Paul could tell who Homer’s old flames had been by how courtly he was with them, loyal in a way he was with no one else — not authors, relations, or even his best foreign confederates. Sex with Homer seemed to lead to friendship, perhaps the most unambivalent relationships he had. He was a ladies’ man, and not just in the accepted sense of the term. Women seemed to offer him a solace that was missing from his noisy yet inarticulate sparring with men.
It was impossible for Homer to be really close to another male; his Neanderthal instinct was too strong. He boasted about his affection for his authors, the Three Aces in particular, but when Paul joined them for lunch, as he was always invited to because Homer, he sensed, was uncomfortable one-on-one, the conversation often ended up being superficial, if not inane — a terrible waste when three of the leading writers in the world were sitting at the table. Homer, for all his impact, was a man of a few words, many of them unprintable, which got repeated over and over in ingenious combinations. “And so forth and so on” was how his stories tended to trail off, with a dismissive wave. “Let’s go make a book” was how he brought lunch to a close.
What Homer thrived on most was having enemies. Nothing gave him more pleasure than cutting dead a former employee — a “deserter,” hence a nonperson — or providing a denigrating comment about a competitor to The Daily Blade. In his days doing army PR he’d learned that it didn’t matter what you said as long as you were quoted. He had a series of rubber stamps for unwelcome correspondence, which he’d return with GREAT MOMENTS IN LITERATURE, HORSESHIT PIE, or best of all FUCK YOU VERY MUCH smudged in big black letters across the pages. He delighted in accusing Sandy Isenberg, the pint-sized president of Owl House, of boorishness, making bellicose public sallies that left Sandy, a short man unaccustomed to opposition of any kind, sputtering with rage.
Best of all, though, was fighting with agents, those parasites who interfered with his private relations with his property — i.e., his authors. Paul, who felt it was advisable to get along with people if possible because you might want or need to do business with them in the future, now and again suggested it might be politic to reestablish relations with Agent X, who had incurred Homer’s ire years ago by selling a book he’d wanted to Farrar, Straus or Knopf.
“Don’t give me that Christian forgiveness bullshit, Dukach. I’m a vindictive Jew!” he’d bellow. “End of joke!”—another classic Homer Stern way of closing a conversation.
One agent who loomed in his imagination was Angus McTaggart, with whom Homer enjoyed a long-standing sadomasochistic bromance. McTaggart, who professed to adore Homer, adored working his way through Homer’s catalog even more, signing up his unrepresented or badly represented writers and then demanding oversize improvements in their compensation for their next books, which Homer delighted in being outraged about. Most of the writers ended up staying, on terms that made publishing them unprofitable for Homer, but some of the bigger ones did occasionally leave for greener pastures, like Abe Burack, after he finally hit it big with his big Brooklyn novel, A Patch on Bernie. Homer would thunder and swear and refuse to take Angus’s calls for a few weeks or months. Then Angus would take him out to lunch, grovel apologetically, and pick up the check, an unheard-of deviation from the publisher-agent quadrille, and the cycle would start up again. But unlike the Nympho, another powerful agent who couldn’t help taking Homer’s acting-out personally (to be fair, there was a misogynist cast to many of his jabs), Angus reveled in the ritualized combat that was a way of averting boredom for both of them.
Homer loved winning, and loved seeing others lose even more. But he also enjoyed the game for its own sake. And he was extraordinarily good at it. He had created a highly articulated organism and employed the diversionary color of his personality effectively in its service — unless he got carried away, as he quite often did, by his emotions. His employees felt to him like his “illegitimate children”; they were the best in the business because they were his. He was no intellectual and didn’t pretend to be, though he read, or “sniffed,” as he put it, all the books he published. He was an amateur, in the original sense of the word: he loved writing and writers. And he was unmatched at the one thing that mattered to them more than anything — even money: he could get them talked about.
Now, having more or less recovered from his agon with the notebooks, Paul mentioned to Homer and Sally that he was rereading Pepita’s demolishing essay on Outerbridge in Retrospective Transgressions, her scathing study of postwar Communist intellectuals. Pepita had become the darling of The Protagonist, the anti-Stalinist left-wing review, early in her career, when they’d published “Jiving with Joe,” her exposé of the totalitarian principles that underlay Movement aesthetics, which had put her on the map as the nerviest cultural critic of her generation.
“I met Outerbridge in Venice,” Homer was saying, re-hearsing the story Paul had heard time and again. “Celine was his landlady. I was there the night he saw Ida again, ten years after their first affair. He was sitting on the Marino Marini in the courtyard — with the cock detached, naturally — drunk as usual. But still a good-looking man in his sixties — not quite an alter kocker. Too bad nobody reads him anymore.” Homer’s evil grin was a wonder to behold.
“I wouldn’t quite say that, Homer,” Paul demurred. “But what about Ida? Did you try to get her to come to us? Not just then but—”
“Is the pope Catholic?” Homer interrupted. “What self-respecting publisher wouldn’t — though most of these pischikers can’t tell their ass from their elbow. But Ida has always been loyal to Wainwright — though she did promise that if she ever made a change, she’d come to me.”
Paul had heard that before; it was the oldest line in the business. But a man can dream, can’t he? And this was one dream he and Homer shared. Having Ida at P & S would be an enormous coup for them both. He wondered if it could ever happen. He shouldn’t even be thinking about it; the mere thought was disloyal to Sterling. But he was a publisher, wasn’t he?
A few days later, as if on the spur of the moment, he put in a call to Ida’s agent, Roz Horowitz, a canny old bird who he felt had always had a soft spot for him, and asked her to lunch.
“So tell me about Ida Perkins, Roz. What’s the news?” Paul asked, as they sipped their white wine at Bruno’s, the overpriced midtown watering hole favored by the big publishers before they made their mass exodus to lower Manhattan in the mid- to late teens. On this particular afternoon Knopf’s editorial whiz Jas Busbee, one of the banes of Paul’s existence, was having lunch with the Nympho in one corner, while in the back of the room Angus McTaggart was leaning over the table whispering conspiratorially to his new client, Orin Roden, no doubt plotting about how to move him from P & S to Owl House or somewhere with even bigger pockets (as would soon happen), waving to Paul all the while. “You know she’s always been my favorite poet.”
“Get in line, dollink.” Roz was a diminutive butterball of a woman whose legs didn’t quite reach the floor when she was sitting in her chair. She had several chins and a large pile of hennaed hair pinned on top of her head, oversize sunglasses, and wore bright red lipstick. “That and a nickel will buy you exactly nothing. Ida Perkins is everybody’s favorite poet, and you know it.”
“Well, not quite everyone’s. I never understood why she and Elspeth Adams were so standoffish.”