Irving was the most charming fellow you would want to meet. I mean that. At first, of course, you stiffened. Irving did that to people. He was an albuminoid. He was one with Karloff and Chaney, one of the greats. But you soon softened. Because Irving was really a sweet person. He talked just above a whisper in a curiously melodious, high-pitched, singsong voice. And with utmost sincerity. When Irving spoke, you felt like a chosen creature, and although you knew he was brilliant you never felt stupid with him. Another thing, he was nearly blind. His long, cartilaginous nose supported twin microscopes, through which eh seemed always to be peering. But never really at this world. That is my most lasting impression of Irving, a sepulchral peering figure. He was ubiquitous in that guise. Once I saw him walking through an IRT subway train and worried lest he fall between the cars and be crushed. Another time I saw him close by a lamppost in Greenwich Village, as if for safety or security. I …
Suggested Reading
The Green and the Gold
By Helen Longstreth“Gabe said he’d told his dad that he’d marry me if he had a dollar. ‘I dunno about marriage,’ I told him.”
The Daily
First Person
The Art of Poetry No. 114
By Sharon Olds
From left, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, Olds, and Brenda Hillman in the Oakley house at the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, California, 1989. Courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers.
Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its title poem, whose speaker is locked in a box she can open only by repeating after Satan: “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” At the time, Olds—who was born in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia—was married to a psychiatrist, and she spent her days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, caring for their two young children. Not long after the book’s publication, she told me last year, someone who had invited her to give a reading picked her up at the airport and said, “I thought you would look angrier.”
From the Archive, Issue 244
Interview
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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