Lucy Ives, _Loudermilk, or, The Real Poet, or, The Origin of the World_

 IT OCCURRED TO me recently that, much as I would like to read a biography of Jorie Graham, I am unlikely ever to see one. Literary biography does not attract scholars quite as magnetically as it did in the days of Richard Ellmann, Leon Edel, and George Painter—it is no longer the royal road to academic eminence—and, more crucially, I am only four years younger than Graham and will likely be on the wrong side of the grass before her first biographer has even gotten a research grant. 

Fortunate for me, then, that Graham is glimpsable in a couple of interesting novels: Samantha Lan Chang’s All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (see LLL for Feb 26, 2023) and this one. Moreover, Ives provides a quick sketch of the era when Graham’s marriage to James Galvin was ending, which I suspect will be one of the more compelling chapters of the biography I will not get to read.

Loudermilk is a campus novel, then, but more in the high farce vein than the satirical one, and witty and poignant even when its characters are in embarrassing binds, as they frequently are. The cleverest touch is that Ives builds the plot around the Cyrano trope. Troy Loudermilk is a handsome, campus stud type of guy who sees a graduate creative writing program as the best way to continue to live the life he desires—a nice stipend, access to lots of young women, etc. However, Loudermilk cannot write, so he recruits Harry Rego, a shy friend who can, to accompany him to the prestigious proghram he has gotten into and write his workshop submissions for him.

Loudermilk/Rego are the hit of the workshop—a big bonus in the novel is that Ives, a poet, can write poems that in their originality and eccentricity do seem like the sort of thing that would draw admiration in a workshop. Loudermilk/Rego s success also fires the envy, naturally, of the workshop’s super-ambitious would-be Top Poet, Anton Beans, whose investigations will eventually topple Loudermilk’s precarious dissimulation. But Harry Rego, one is happy to see, lands on his feet.

Tucked into the novel is the story of Claire Elwil, an aspiring fiction writer with a bad case of impostor syndrome. Her circuitous route to finding her voice and her confidence by writing a short story about an encounter with Courbet’s painting L’Origine du Monde creates a neat contrapuntal melody to the main plot’s story of fraud and ambition.