Ivan Gold; fiction writer (in December)
Hyfler/Rosner
University and there's the announcement of his death. He
wasn't the most famous writer in the world, but he was up
there. I found my copy of Nickel Miseries, which was always
in his byline in his NY Times book reviews. One of those
old Avon paperbacks which they were trying to push as lurid
writing because the copy on the back reads, "Only Ivan Gold
could tell these stories: Bobbie Bedmer gave of herself 160
times in 70 hours to the Werewolves Gang. George Washington
Carver Brown was doomed to failure but he could not help
dragging others into his sorrows. Kimiko sings of the
snakepit, home of fun and fantasy and love at a price."
The Boston Globe obit follows. Apparently, we didn't have
it on alt.obituaries. And no other newspaper picked it up
that I can find.
Then the piece from the bulletin.
Then, a review of his only novel from the NY Times, 1990.
Ivan Gold, at 75; was celebrated writer and educator
By Bryan Marquard, Globe Staff | January 13, 2008
Accolades from the literary firmament began raining on Ivan
Gold when he was a college student, and he did not know a
drought lay ahead.
He slouched in embarrassment at Columbia University in the
early 1950s when his professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
Mark Van Doren, set aside the cannon of great books one day
to say the class should discuss a story Mr. Gold had
written.
The plaudits continued in 1963 when Mr. Gold published
"Nickel Miseries," a book of short stories and novellas.
Lionel Trilling, a preeminent critic, said the "masterly"
collection showed the kind of promise that "will make Mr.
Gold one of the commanding writers of our time."
Alcoholism eroded Mr. Gold's output: He published only two
more books. But in 1990 he ended a silence of 21 years with
the publication of "Sams in a Dry Season," a novel hailed by
Philip Roth and Robert Stone. Mr. Gold completed a final
book before dying on Dec. 23 in the Neville Center nursing
and rehabilitation facility in Cambridge. He was 75 and had
prostate cancer.
"People were saying, 'How can anyone live up to that kind of
remark?' And I came to internalize it," he said of
Trilling's praise in a 1990 interview with The Washington
Post. "He didn't do me any favors, and yet he certainly
meant to."
After his first novel, "Sick Friends," was published in
1969, "there was a long wet period for me," Mr. Gold, who
lived for 30 years off Kenmore Square, told the Associated
Press in 1990. "I drank myself out of any possible career."
Instead, he slipped into a life few would have envisioned
for him, least of all Mr. Gold. He taught writing at Boston
University and helped found The Writers' Room, a haven in
the Back Bay that provides affordable workspace. He took his
last drink in August 1976 and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
And setting aside anonymity, he turned his life into art
with the autobiographical "Sams in a Dry Season,"
chronicling an alcoholic writer's final days of drinking and
hesitant steps into sobriety.
"This is a brave, open book, harsh, dogged, and relentless,
a confession bursting through the contours of a novel,
convincingly truthful and inventively written," Roth wrote.
The writer Dan Wakefield, who took Van Doren's class at
Columbia with Mr. Gold, called his longtime friend "a pure
writer" who was "totally committed to his writing and his
work. He was a perfectionist, which I think is one of the
things that explains why he didn't have a greater output.
But the output he did have, in my opinion, showed superb
craftsmanship and a real love of language and respect for
language."
Of Mr. Gold's "The Nickel Misery of George Washington Carver
Brown," Wakefield said: "I could recite the first sentence
of that story; it was such a great sentence in my mind."
The novella begins: "The day that Carver Brown fell backward
from the freshly painted pinnacle of failure (setting even
for him a new low) was the day before Thanksgiving Day: it
dawned in frozen reds and blues, without portent."
In an interview, Stone said, " 'Nickel Miseries' was a great
collection of stories," and added that "anybody who is
really good always raises the bar, and he was really good."
Though Mr. Gold lived in Boston nearly half his life, and
the city figures prominently in his two novels, he often
wrote in a cadence that reflected both his upbringing in New
York's Lower East Side and the writer he most admired.
"Very early on in his career, even in high school, he was
very influenced by William Faulkner, and the style he
developed was very Faulknerian," said the writer Charles
Marowitz, a friend since junior high.
"He went in for long convoluted sentences where a thought
would link to the next thought and the thought after that
without a series of gaps," Marowitz said. "It really was
like a flow of water. It had a sort of remorseless fluency
about it which was very much like what happens in our own
minds when we're dealing with particular issues. We don't
think in short declarative bursts."
Drawing deeply from his own life for source material, Mr.
Gold found plentiful source material. Reviewing "Sams in a
Dry Season," the Chicago Tribune called it "the first of a
new literary genre, the frankly semi-fictional confession
that contains both a fictional and a 'real' authorial self."
Even those who saw themselves or others in his books were
not put off by Mr. Gold's unsparing portraits.
"I admired his prose and I admired his honesty," said his
sister, Judith Stitzel of Morgantown, W.Va. "It seems to me
that his ethical concerns and his aesthetic concerns, they
really came from the same place. There was a scrupulous
honesty, sometimes a chastening honesty - a bracing honesty,
with himself as well as with anybody else. When he was being
hard on someone I would think, 'Yes, but he's being just as
hard on himself.' "
Possessed of a mordant sense of humor, Mr. Gold was
sensitive to the ironies in life not always apparent to
others.
"He certainly had a kind of gruff exterior, but he was a
very funny, witty man," said his son, Ian of Dorchester.
Mr. Gold wrote for many years in The Writers' Room, where he
was president for many years. At home, he converted an
angular pantry into an office, glancing upward from his
papers through a window that looked out at Fenway Park's
Green Monster.
As his health declined he finished his last work, which he
called "a novel memoir," from a desk in his bedroom
overlooking the Charles River.
He had nursed his wife, Vera, through her battle with
leukemia until she died nearly four years ago. And in his
last days, Mr. Gold remained a devoted teacher, correcting
papers and using a computer to enter final grades from his
bed in healthcare facilities.
"I was always amazed at the relationships he formed with
students," said his sister, herself a retired college
literature teacher. "It was a sense of not exactly
discipleship, not exactly guru, but people recognized in him
the person who could teach them. Those relationships were
awe inspiring in many ways, and very moving"
In addition to his son and sister, Mr. Gold leaves two
granddaughters.
A service will be held at 1 p.m. Feb. 23 in First Church in
Boston.
February 22, 2008
A BU Writer Remembered
Novelist Ivan Gold dies at 75; memorial Saturday
By Natalie Jacobson McCracken
In 1953, Columbia undergraduate Ivan Gold published the
short story "Change of Air." It "stayed in my memory as one
of the most moving stories I had ever read," the literary
critic Lionel Trilling wrote 10 years later, "and I wondered
how the young author would go on from that remarkable
accomplishment." Trilling was reviewing, with admiration,
Gold's first book, Nickel Miseries, a collection of short
stories he said "give promise of an even further development
that will make Mr. Gold one of the commanding writers of his
time."
Gold, who taught creative writing and literature in the Arts
and Sciences English department and in Metropolitan College
through last fall, died on December 23. He was 75.
Gold's first novel, published in 1969, was a more telling
predictor than Nickel Miseries. The Library Journal called
Sick Friends "one of the best and most entertaining
fictional portraits of a man entire." Like many first-novel
protagonists, heavy-drinking young writer Jason Sams seemed
very like his creator.
Sams and Gold were 21 years older when the next book, Sams
in a Dry Season, appeared. The novel is set in 1976, and
drinking has overwhelmed Sams' professional and personal
life. He visits his parents in New York, returns to Boston,
joins Alcoholics Anonymous (as Gold did in the same year),
and resumes writing.
A chorus of reviewers welcomed Gold's return and hailed Sams
for its insight, uncompromising honesty, and comic vision.
Philip Roth described it as "a brave, open book, harsh,
dogged, and relentless, a confession burning through the
contours of a novel."
Boston University was an important part of Gold's own long
dry season and a happy observer of his triumphant return. A
New Yorker by birth, inclination, and writer's voice, he
moved, with his wife, Vera, to Boston in 1974 to teach in
the Arts and Sciences Creative Writing Program and taught
writing, along with the occasional modern novel course,
through Metropolitan College until the fall 2007 semester
ended. A vital part of Boston's community of writers -
according to the Boston Globe, he helped found the Writers'
Room of Boston, which provides affordable workspace to
emerging and established writers - he asked distinguished
friends to teach the last few classes and graded papers in
his hospital bed.
Gold's wife had died in 2004. He and his cats continued to
live in an apartment virtually on campus, so that his circle
of admiring friends included, along with students and
colleagues, those who came to know him more casually. "I'm
writing the next novel - slower than when I was younger, but
writing," he told this fan.
Last year he completed that novel, Out of a Clear Blue Sky,
which his childhood friend Charles Marowitz, a theater
critic, a director, and a playwright, described as "delving
remorselessly into the death of his parents, which occurred
in quick succession, and his own gradual debilitation,
describing in finite detail and with surgical clarity the
parts of his metabolism that were failing him, the key
medical terms employed to chronicle their regression." His
work remained tough and clear-sighted. "His body had become
his overriding theme and he its faithful narrator."
A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday,
February 23, at First Church on Boston's Marlborough Street.
September 24, 1990
Books of The Times;
After 2 Decades of Silence, a Novel on Alcoholism
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
LEAD:
Sams in a Dry Season
By Ivan Gold
244 pages. Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence. $19.95.
Sams in a Dry Season
By Ivan Gold
244 pages. Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence. $19.95.
In the early 1960's, Ivan Gold published ''Nickel
Miseries,'' a collection of stories, some of which he had
written as an undergraduate at Columbia and as a disciple of
the teacher and critic Lionel Trilling. The collection's
tough, economical style and acute moral vision of society's
outsiders made Mr. Gold a writer to watch, especially in
light of the decade's upheavals. A novel, ''Sick Friends,''
followed in 1969; it was full of talent but self-indulgent.
Then Mr. Gold fell silent. No more books for two decades.
One quickly learns why at the opening of his newly published
novel, ''Sams in a Dry Season.'' The first chapter is called
''Still Drinking After All These Years.'' The year is 1976.
Jason Sams is a creative-writing teacher at the University
of Greater Boston and about to lose his job to an English
novelist named Fiona.
''He was entering his eighth year of marriage, father of one
and author of two (in marked contrast to Fiona, divorced dam
of seven, perpetrator of six), 43 and intermittently aware
that alcohol had become less useful to him than once it had
been, at some indeterminate period in his life. He knew
there might well come a day (comfortably in the future) when
he would elect to give it up entirely.'' But that future is
more imminent and less comfortable than Jason anticipates.
In the pages that follow, he will descend on New York City
to see if he can scare up still more advance money for the
new book he isn't writing and to drop in on his parents, who
have stuck it out in an apartment in the deteriorating East
Village.
There will be no more advance money; publishing times have
changed, and the editor who once succored Jason has dropped
dead on a golf course at the age of 37. But when Jason
visits his parents on the Friday night Sabbath, he learns
that his father's twin brother has died and will be buried
Sunday. So the trip has a point after all. Jason will stay
on for the funeral.
Though time trickles away unaccountably, the weekend is not
a lost one. Bad memories keep Jason from oblivion. Wrestling
with these, Jason finds he doesn't just need a drink. Drink
has become the whole point. On the Saturday night before the
funeral, meaning to nurse a glass of Scotch, he ends up
downing two entire bottles.
But on Monday aboard the train home, a miracle occurs in the
form of panicked withdrawal. Back in Boston, he staggers to
Alcoholics Anonymous. By the end of the novel, he is keeping
a journal. The book in the reader's hands is the story's
ultimate resolution. It is an occasion for cheering. Though
the details are fictional, the story strikes one as too
close to autobiography not to engage the reader in what one
inevitably reads as Mr. Gold's personal struggle.
But one wants the book to be more than an inspirational
story. One wants Jason's alcoholism to have some deeper
meaning. Mr. Gold tries. At several points in the story, he
links Jason's drinking to his writing, as if he were going
to confront the great mystery of why so many American
writers drink. But he won't romanticize Jason or let him kid
himself. Jason may drink because writing makes him anxious,
but the only effect of alcohol is to interfere further with
his writing. Jason is long past the stage when drinking can
do him any good creatively, if in fact it ever did.
Mr. Gold also tries to fashion a prose style that reflects
the effect of alcohol on his character's awareness. As Jason
goes off on his weekend bender, the novel's sentences begin
to fragment and collide. The technique may even be a
conscious tribute to certain of Mr. Gold's predecessors.
''In his time . . . he had become as smashed as Papa ever
got, in Cuba or the Keys, as creatively looped as Faulkner
ever got in his own barn, ah now, that bastard, I devoured
him, even read Mosquitoes twice and tried like hell to read
the poetry, then for years wrote just like him, if you
believe that, Jewish kid from the Lower East Side of
Manhattan playing Ivy League aristocrat way up there on
Morningside Heights knowing he would never make it until one
day having read and reread all the works of the great
William Faulkner published to that time began writing like
the mind of the South, struggling toward a style, until one
day confronted the man himself. . . .'' And so on for whole
pages.
But such a style suggests inebriation only at several
removes. It is even far from the prose disintegration of
Malcolm Lowry's Consul in ''Under the Volcano.'' It is
closer to what a sober mind might apprehend watching a
drunken mind reeling.
In the end, Mr. Gold is really too tough-minded to find high
art in the subject of alcoholism. As Jason falls in step
with the routines of A.A., he learns that the objective is
to get through one day at a time and that, as members
themselves often say, the reason drunks drink is that they
are drunks.
In the end, ''Sams in a Dry Season'' is worthwhile simply
because it is the well-told story of a man's recovery. Now
that Ivan Gold has written that book, he can move on and
write others.
