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.

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