On the Topic of a Cult Classic: Emily Gould Interviews Stephen Koch About Iris Owens and After Claude
Emily Books Interview with Stephen Koch
SK: In some ways, I come a little unprepared. There are two things I wanted to bring you but they’re just about me so they’re not very significant, but it’s interesting for me. The original edition of After Claude, which Iris inscribed to me—a very, very nice inscription, It gets me a little tearful sometimes. And then, another thing I discovered in my papers recently that just astonished me, it’s really interesting, so we’ll skip forward quickly. In 1976, the summer of 1976, I wrote a lead article for Esquire Magazine called “The Guilty Sex.” It was about men in the age of that period who had been discovered to be the oppressor sex. I think recently it was republished, somebody found it and said it was prophetic.
EG: What’s it called? I’ll look it up.
SK: It’s called “The Guilty Sex.” And Iris read it, and wrote me a very admiring letter. I mean, really admiring.
EG: Is that how you met though? You met at a party, I read.
SK: I met her at Susan Sontag’s house. It was not a party. She had known Susan in Paris when Susan was involved with what Iris would have called a “truckdriver” named Harriet Zwerling—Susan was. She had come over to Paris from Barnard—which had been a great experience for her, by the way. I think it was the only institution of any kind that I never heard her speak badly of. She loved Barnard.
EG: Our intern who is going to be transcribing this is going to get a kick out of that, because she is currently enrolled at Barnard.
SK: She had wonderful tutoring and help. And she went to Paris to find herself, be a writer, and so forth. And there she met a man who was going to be very influential for a while, now forgotten and long dead, named Alexander Trocchi. And Alexander Trocchi and she had a very passionate affair.
EG: And he’s the author of Cain’s Book, right?
SK: Yes, that’s correct. And he was the sort of prose-Allen Ginsberg, that was the theory. It wasn’t true, but nonetheless that was the theory.
EG: Are you a fan?
SK: I read him when I was an adolescent. No. Probably not. But he was a very, very compelling person. And Iris had a love affair with him. He is the MacDonald of all her books, including After Claude, that’s when she says, “I left my great love MacDonald in Paris,” that’s who it was. She was very fond of him. Very, very fond of him. And he was very instrumental in the dirty book business. The way it was is he lived off of fine and talented English-speaking young writers, and bringing them to Maurice Girodias, and saying “This person can write a dirty book for you, I promise you.” And so he had a string of people who wrote pornographic books of whom Iris became one, because she was his girlfriend. And did a very very good job on them. Alexander Trocchi decided that it was essential that Maurice Girodias publish Samuel Beckett, and he brought one of the books and said “you have to publish this.” And Maurice said “This is not a dirty book! I have no interest in it. You really must understand.” And Alex said “It is going to be of interest to you, because I’m telling you has to be.” He said, “Well, what do you mean?” He said “I will organize a strike of your writers—you won’t see another page—until you publish Beckett.”
EG: And did that work?
SK: And that worked. That’s how Samuel Beckett got published first…by Girodias being blackmailed by Alex.
EG: Can I back up a little bit? I don’t know if you know this stuff, but she went to Barnard and then moved to Paris to find herself and be a writer. What was her background? How could she do something like that?
SK: She was raised in New York. Her father was a professional gambler, so that they would sometimes move into Park Avenue apartments and then have to move out in the middle of the night to a slum, because they had gone from rich to poor in a week. And he met her mother—who lived up until the time I knew Iris, although I never met her. It was a very unorthodox childhood in a sense that it was, unorthodox in that it was Jewish, intellectual in a sense.
EG: And she later became a gambler too, right?
SK: Yes, it seems it was in the genes because she, for many years, lived off of professional gambling. One of her ex-boyfriends, I don’t remember his name… Jerry Robinson. Jerry Robinson was sort of a mathematical phenomenon. A massively brilliant mind and memory for numbers and for calculations. And he made a team of Iris. He worked at IBM, he working for their computer systems. But he loved Iris and they would go out and gamble together, and with his fantastic ability with numbers and her fantastic cool, they got into quite high stakes. They often gambled with Woody Allen.
EG: Gambling … poker?
SK: Poker. Well, it didn’t always work. You would hear about Iris being a little upset about last night. Yes, she was a gambler. And I don’t know how long she played in those games. Once Jerry was off the scene—Jerry then married a friend of hers. She was the daughter of Dore Schary. Her name was Jill Robinson. She wrote novels. Quite lousy novels. And Jill was married to Jerry Robinson. Everything sort of dissolved the team of the dynamic duo that conquered the poker tables.
EG: Circa when was this?
SK: The date of After Claude was about 1976. Right around the time I wrote “The Guilty Sex.” I would say ’72 through ’77, ’78. But after the book published, it was before then. In fact, I would say 1970 through… whenever she got back from Paris. Until maybe 1974 or 5. That would be my rough guess.
EG: I distracted you, I’m sorry. Let me get back to when you met.
SK: I had met Susan through some of my writer friends, and I had become a protégée. That’s really what I was. At that stage of her life, she loved protégées and did very well by them. She was very fond of them at the time and helpful to them.
EG: One of our picks was Sigrid Nunez’s book about being a protégée of hers.
SK: By Sigrid Nunez? Sigrid was one of them. Her book is very good and very credible. There was a lot that I didn’t know while Sigrid was living with Susan. A lot was her romance with David. But I believe it, I think it’s a very honest book.
So I met Iris then, probably in ’67. Iris was talking about a piece that either Nabokov had written about Girodias or Girodias had written about Nabokov. Either Nabokov was claiming that he was a filthy French thief and pornographer not worthy of attention, or Girodias calling Nabokov an ungrateful pretentious bully. I think that piece was, they were talking about it. Iris claimed that she had edited parts of Lolita.
EG: Do you think that’s true?
SK: I was very skeptical about it. I’ve never seen any information about it.
EG: Ah, who knows.
SK: But Maurice would certainly not let anyone know that that was going on. And Iris, she had all kinds of character qualities, but she didn’t lie. I don’t remember, I think she had said some trivial white lies but I don’t remember her lying at any time—
EG: So a brilliant poker player, but not a liar.
SK: Generally when she said something, you could see that there was an Iris twist on it. The facts were right. Some time afterwards I bumped into her and we started having coffee. Then I came to visit her and I fell under the Iris spell.
EG: But not a romantic thing?
SK: Never a romantic thing. Never. I was too quote smart for that unquote. Someone involved in a romantic relationship with Iris was interested in trouble.
EG: What kind of trouble?
SK: Well it didn’t happen often enough for me to really know. She was very quick—not in a Harriet way—but very quick to feel herself mistreated. Often in situations when she was not being mistreated. I’ve never thought of this before, that’s a good question. I don’t think Iris was prepared to change her life for anybody. For any reason. She liked having interesting lovers, and she had a long string of them. But the idea of Iris moving in with somebody, or somebody moving in with her, which of course is one of the basic themes in After Claude… It was a thing unimaginable. Interrupt any time with any questions you want.
EG: Where was the apartment exactly?
SK: Apartment Number 8. Cornelia Street. It was on the sixth floor. It wasn’t particularly an arty building, but Iris was there. And she lived there the entire time that I knew her until her death. I could draw you a picture of every piece of furniture. So. It was a one-bedroom, rather modest apartment with some very nice things, usually given to her by exes. There was one guy who was a dealer and she had rare Chinese furniture and tapestries and silkscreens and these gorgeous long, Chinese chairs that she sat in along with a tapestry hanging. But the spell was what was interesting. I’ve since come to recognize a little more about it than I knew. You should probably read the Emily Prager introduction. When I began, I thought god, Emily Prager was a terrible choice. But then I read the introduction, and she’s not bad about the spell and why friendships with Iris were tiring.
She rarely left the apartment. She drank quite a lot. And in that stage of my life, I did too. And she was an absolutely wonderful talker. She was obviously very, very intelligent, and an exchange with her about anything would take you places you were not expecting to go. Always. You want to talk about Anthony Weiner, Iris would be in another chamber altogether and it would be a pretty interesting place. So, that was very attractive. She was also… She was beautiful. As I was thinking about her looks, I was thinking of the line from Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare: “Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.” That was it. She had gray hair when I met her. Always did. She seemed never to change. She was just this beautiful woman who was on the verge of middle age. And it never stopped. I mean, I didn’t see her in the last years. But I saw her once, at some opening or something. She was more white haired, but she was certainly not aged in any obvious painful way.
EG: Maybe the secret is never leaving your apartment.
SK: Well, that had something to do with it. I’ve since learned that many people who are agoraphobic, which she certainly was, develop the ability to spin a spell that will keep people from leaving.
EG: Oh, that makes sense.
SK: And that’s what happened to me. I would go to see Iris for a cup of coffee at three, and leave at three a.m. And that was quite a characteristic.
EG: Oh, I know people who are like that. And you do start to feel sort of trapped, right?
SK: I felt trapped, but I was in such an interesting trap. But it was a trap. The day was destroyed, my next day was destroyed. And she had not wanted me to leave at three o’clock, even. Not that she could have lived with anyone, but. The spell was extremely sound.
EG: But then you said it would end, right? It was finite.
SK: Iris had, I would say, to put it crudely, Iris actually had a very wide sadistic streak. And once she had someone under the spell, that person could expect that her real attraction for them would involve a fair amount of humiliation as well.
EG: How would she effect this humiliation if she didn’t leave her apartment much?
SK: You could talk about something that she could take into the equivalent of the conversation and formulate how you’re wrong. How you’re wrong in your typical way of being wrong. And shake your confidence. She was very good at shaking confidence. Making one stop believing in oneself. It could be quite frightening. I think that’s what happened with Emily Prager. This happened quite often. And so, in the end, I felt bound into a kind of S&M relationship with her. Really kind of intellectual. I remember thinking at one point, “Well, this will only end when either she dies or I die. And I can’t stop it.”
EG: Clearly it ended much sooner. What happened?
SK: It ended much sooner in the sense that I just thought, “I’m just not going to do this anymore.”
EG: One day, you just…
SK: Well, it took me months. But I gathered my energy and decided, “No more.” I won’t go back. It doesn’t matter how funny she is or how smart or how talented, or how wound up in her I am, I won’t endure another second. And I didn’t. And she was very sad. I would return her letters to her unopened. And it just ended slowly. I would very much avoid going anywhere I thought she was likely to be, but she wasn’t likely to be in most places, so that was not a problem. This makes her sound like a monster. And she was, in a way, a sort of monster. I would not have traded my friendship with her for anything. It was very good, but I know that a lot of my career was in shambles because of her.
EG: For how long?
SK: Ten years.
EG: Ten years?
SK: Ten years.
EG: Why? How? What did she do?
SK: You’d say, “I am working on something—”
EG: Oh, she undermined you.
SK: You would walk in thinking, “I’m really getting somewhere,” and you would walk away wanting to tear it up.
EG: That sounds like a… When you say spell, it’s hardly…
SK: Misery loves company. Anyway, it’s crazy. So, she loved having other non-productive writers around her. That was why I was so blown over by her response to that essay. I came across it recently, in my papers, and it was so warm, so admiring, and so insightful.
EG: And that was after you had…?
SK: No, we were still friends, although things were getting bad. The unpleasant parts were getting more frequent, and more unpleasant.
EG: You said that she didn’t lie.
SK: Not in my experience.
EG: So when she undermined you, did you feel like she was telling you the truth? The truth about your ideas?
SK: That truth is not exactly what you need to undermine someone. What you need to do is make them feel that they’re a fool to think they can do this.
EG: It seems that she was especially good at undermining her own efforts.
SK: Oh, yeah. When I say misery loves company, she was —, she talked about it endlessly. Amusingly, and also painfully. And, for example, she played poker with Woody Allen. But would she have socialized with him? I think not. Because he would have been immune. Or, if he wasn’t immune, he would have known when to leave, when to walk out. And I was a kid, and I didn’t.