On the Topic of a Cult Classic: Emily Gould Interviews Stephen Koch About Iris Owens and After Claude
EG: A lot of the books that we end up featuring, sometimes we republish things that have fallen out of print, and sometimes we revive things that were initially published badly for whatever reason… The initial publication of After Claude was not bad at all, as far as I can tell. It was good, right?
SK: Wonderful. It was very well-reviewed. Very well-reviewed. It got a lot of attention in Newsweek. There was a big Newsweek article about it which filled her with humiliation.
EG: Why?
SK: She told the reporter that she was specialized in the years before in being an interesting failure. This was quoted, and it just was a nightmare. She just couldn’t believe that she’d been so indiscreet as to set herself up for that. I myself didn’t think it was going to do her any damage at all, but she did. And then she got into a war with [her publisher] Roger Straus, as she did with anyone who was very generous with her. She would always wage war.
EG: She couldn’t accept generosity?
SK: Not really. She could accept admiration, and she could accept special experiences, but Roger Straus—the real editor was Henry Robbins, not Roger. Roger had a kind of confidence that Iris was very interested in puncturing, and it didn’t work. She could have had a great career … but she shouldn’t have fought with Roger.
EG: No, that seems like a tactical error.
SK: It was impossible to stop her from doing these things. She believed, like a lot of people at that point, she believed in magic. She thought that since she had a book that was very funny—that could have a wide audience, that had been widely reviewed in national publication– she ought to be the new Stephen King. And when she wasn’t, when it was just another novel sending under ten thousand copies, like most novels do, she believed she had been betrayed. And all of this is paranoia. Let’s talk about something nice. What next?
EG: I don’t know if this counts as something nice, but you did sort of bring this up, and I have to ask, although I think I’m already getting a sense that I know the answer. I’m sure a lot of people who read Emily Prager’s introduction and then read the book think that possibly, Iris was Harriet-esque. But it sounds like in many ways, she really wasn’t. What do you think her relationship to that character was?
SK: Well, first of all, she was about ten times more intelligent than Harriet, which means that she would not say the preposterous things that Harriet said, although she might think them. She knew her own depressedent capacities and how to laugh at them, so that Harriet is always, almost on the edge of being right, but she’s preposterously wrong at the same time. That was the gift that she saw. And it went straight into the heart of it, that who she was. It’s hard to say exactly how, but it was. She loved to be amused, and she was very amusing. Irony and self-irony played no small role in that. Her own self-irony would be way above Harriet’s in terms of its mental contact, but the twist was always there. She would give other people a hard time, but she gave herself a hard time too. Sometimes hysterically, and sometimes with a kind of twist of the knot. Anyway, should we talk about After Claude? At a certain point, Iris used to go to a string of establishments in the Village where she was certain to be given things from the owner, because they were very in love with her. And one of them was a bar that still exists called The 55. And Iris would go to The 55, which was just essentially just a long hall, old, reeking with alcohol. I was never actually in it, but I’ve noticed it still there. She would go and shut the place down at three a.m., and come home with someone, often. She did in this case come home with a guy who I believe was a reporter for maybe time, maybe one of the big glossy publications, and she became pregnant.
I think I was almost the only person she confided this in. She was very, very torn about what to do. But if she wanted the child, she knew this was her only chance. He was a perfectly smart, fine person, who wasn’t interested in being a father, but there was nothing wrong with him. She was really in a dilemma. And she wanted to hash it out with me, so we hashed it out.
I told her two things: I was a little lonely, and crazy, and would have loved to have a child. Loved it—as I later did love having a child. I told her if she had the child, I would join in raising it. I wouldn’t be the father, I wouldn’t pretend, but I would be very present for it all. I also told her that if she had the baby, she would never write another book. Which was true. That touches a little bit about Iris’s relationship to money, which was very mysterious—because how you could sit in those beautiful Chinese chairs year after year and continue to have the flow of cash? So, we went back and forth, and we did a lot of talking about the book that she would never write. I don’t know where I got the confidence to say she would never write a book, but for all I know, I was right.
So she decided to have an abortion, which was still then illegal. I went with her by train to Florida. The guy, I think, was not quite interested in the decision, and not interested in paternity, but I think he was financially quite sound and undertook the cost of all this. She took a train with me going to Florida to have the abortion with a respectable, needless to say, good physician. Then we took the train back, and the emotions coming back were even more complicated than going down. It took a day and a half, or something. One of us started talking about the book she was never going to write. And, I think it was on the train, I’m not sure of this, but she said, “At least I have a first line.” And I said, “Really? What is it?” And she said, “Claude left me, the French rat.”
And I started to laugh. I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever heard. And I said to her, “You have to write this book. It is essential that you do.” She said “But it’s just a line, it was nothing.” I kept saying, “Of course it’s not nothing. It doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from somewhere. Get the rest of the somewhere out there and see where we’re going.” I pushed on this relentlessly.
So, she at a certain point began to write with tremendous difficulty. By the way, the opening line was later changed. She called me and said “I know that you’re going to be upset about this, but I changed it to ‘I left Claude, the French rat,’ because Harriet would never admit that she had been left by someone.’” So we built on that, and she wrote with great difficulty, but always what she wrote, she knew what she was doing. That is, she didn’t do what I would do, or anyone in a difficult position as a writer, which is write a piece of crap, and and look at it, and say “This is a piece of crap.” I would do that.
EG: At least you can revise.
SK: Yeah, I do revise. But Iris didn’t do that. The pages were heavily worked, and she was paralyzed. I would come in and almost literally pick up the pages from the floor, where’d they had fallen and been stepped on. I’d say, “You’re having a hard time,” and we’d talk about the hard time for a very long time. Then I said, “It’s not going well, but let’s make a deal. I’m going to type what you do every week.”
EG: That sounds like a great deal for her, I don’t know what kind of a great deal it was for you.
SK: Well, I typed very fast. I wasn’t very accurate, but I was fast. I would take these pages to my apartment and type them. I think I typed almost the whole book, at least once or maybe twice because she would do revisions. So what had happened was that instead of my becoming the father of the child who was not to be there, I was in another analogous role, something she wrote in her inscription to me. She said, “To Stephen: for patiently, lovingly, and wisely following this book.” Something memorable, something along those lines that gets me all choked up. There was a structure to that, really. I never typed the end. She didn’t let me see that.
EG: The whole scene?
SK: The last scene, in the Chelsea. And I’m not quite sure why. I can’t even speculate. Except it was for her, everything. The final scene was essential. It couldn’t not be there. Its role was overwhelmingly significant. I think one of the things that is not known now is that, in the ‘60s—and it was one of the things that was in “The Guilty Sex,” although I wasn’t always aware of it, that Iris and I were thinking along the same line, although from completely different perspectives. There was a phenomenon which was commonplace: a certain kind of bohemian underground guy who would gather around a large number of women who were essentially under his spell, and with them he would be highly manipulative. And they were girls, and they were saints, and they were geniuses. It’s a common phenomenon that has now vanished, so far as I know. It was easy, it was just everywhere.
EG: It was sort of unprecedentedly easy then, I think.
SK: It was just like getting a taxi cab. I didn’t do it and I was male, so I wasn’t ‘in.’ I was also very middle class. I’m not interested in bohemia, it can go fuck itself. I did live within it, and I had a great weakness for interesting people, and god knows Iris was interesting. So, she got to that ending, which is, in my experience, the best description of the female orgasm that I’ve ever read.
EG: Okay.
SK: Well, maybe I haven’t read enough. I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but still. She was very interested in, she was fascinated by Masters and Johnson, just absorbed every syllable. Sex was very interesting to her, in a way that it was of course interesting to everyone, but her mind and her artistic spirit wrapped around it in a very powerful way.
EG: I agree with you, I think that the descriptions of the interiority of the character are very psychologically acute throughout the book, but then in that last scene… Very few writers who aren’t just writing pornography write descriptions of sex with a lot of nuanced description of consciousness.
SK: It’s very, very difficult. The writing is really terrific. And I must say after all of this so-called sexual revolution and the like, I managed the estate of the photographer Peter Hujar. In this same year, in ’76, he did a sort of breakthrough triptych called Triptych of a Male Nude (Bruce de Sainte Croix). It has become famous in the history of photography. In the first, it’s sort of like David in the male nude. Then the second thing is kind of a weird masturbation, which is of this young, passive guy contemplating his erection in a way that is very compelling and interesting. We’re not talking about pornography here. This really wasn’t pornography. The third was a photograph of him masturbating, as he said later, ‘just before the thunder clap.’ It too was a beautiful, remarkable picture. Now I bring this up, because I interviewed him, he’s now in his ‘60s, a semi-retired social worker from the Cape, a very, very intelligent and pleasant person. I interviewed him on film for Peter’s archive. His description of the male orgasm, verbally, was the best I’ve ever heard. I’ve been privileged here, I’ve met two—it was really remarkable, he’s right about everything, have I really never thought about this before? He gets it just exactly right. So that was what was so impressive.
So, she was very filled with anxiety. When she got the —, she went to Florida State with her sister and called me and spent half the night weeping on the telephone because it was such shit, she couldn’t believe it, it was so insubstantial, so trivial, what had she done, how had she deluded herself.
EG: And what were you saying?
SK: I was saying, “You’re not deluding yourself and it’s not insubstantial and it’s not trivial.” I just wouldn’t back down. I was not going to grant her that. She was doing to herself what she could sometimes do to other people, which is look at what they’ve done and humiliate them. It was painful to see that. She gathered steam, she worked better—although never well, it took her a long time. There would be a page every month, or something like that. I exaggerate, I don’t remember.
EG: Three years.
SK: It took a long time. I thought, what Iris needs to do, no matter what — I’m quick to tell people what they need to do, is do this book, establish herself as the comic writer for general fiction, and then do eight more, right away, as fast as possible, using all her resources. And I might as well have suggested that what I need to do is flap my arms and fly to the moon, because it was just an absurd hope.
EG: Do you think drugs would have helped?
SK: Oh yes. She was depressive. She could have used Prozac, I would think. My wife is a psychiatrist—she never met Iris—and thought I was crazy to have been involved with her.
EG: But not in a clinical sense.
SK: No, close. I mean, why do people stay in very powerful and abusive relationships? That’s the question. And I love Iris, I still do. Even though I’m not talking about her very lovingly right now.
EG: I think you’re talking about her honestly. Also, she’s dead, so who cares?
SK: By the way, she died exactly as she feared. She endlessly smoked, and talked about stopping. I must have spent at least ten months listening to her discuss stopping smoking. She was terrified of cancer, and died of double lung cancer, which killed her very quickly. She had known no longer than a week, and was gone.
Enough about that. The book was hilariously funny. I get one mention in it—remember when Harriet is locked out of the apartment, and hires a locksmith to come and the guys comes down the hall, and she says “I had heard that Ilse Koch had a son while she was in prison, but I never hoped to meet the boy.” Do you know who Ilse Koch is?
EG: No.
SK: She was one of the great monsters of the German concentration camps, I think she was in Auschwitz and she was one of the horrendous figures. Imagine that as a compliment.
EG: That’s about as backhanded as it gets.
SK: I always knew that with it, she could have established herself as the comic woman novelist of her period. I had no doubt that she had the equipment for it except for being crippled by her neuroses. She was intelligent enough, shrewd enough, self-composed enough, and talented enough, just lewd enough, that it could have happened. I remember somebody threw a party once for her and Fran Lebowitz, the idea being that the two funniest women in New York should meet each other. It didn’t go well, of course, but still.
EG: They were too alike?
SK: No, actually, they’re not alike. They were friends, but…
When I look back on Iris’s humor… I can’t say what it was. It’s very hard to say what it was. I mean, of course look through After Claude, that kind of stuff happened all the time. But then she’d describe one of Alexander Trocchi’s girlfriends, and how Alex was manipulating this girl, and Alex was, in a way, sort of the prototype for these men. You’d just be listening to this story, and suddenly you’d just be laughing uncontrollably. That was really wonderful commentary, really wonderful, and tragically lost.