A BU Writer Remembered

In 1953, Columbia undergraduate Ivan Gold published the short story“Change of Air.” It “stayed in my memory as one of the mostmoving stories I had ever read,” the literary critic Lionel Trillingwrote 10 years later, “and I wondered how the young author would go onfrom that remarkable accomplishment.” Trilling was reviewing, withadmiration, Gold’s first book, Nickel Miseries, a collection ofshort stories he said “give promise of an even further development thatwill make Mr. Gold one of the commanding writers of histime.”

Gold, who taught creative writing andliterature in the Arts and Sciences English department and inMetropolitan 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 manentire.” 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 sameyear), and resumes writing.

A chorus of reviewers welcomed Gold’s return and hailed Samsfor its insight, uncompromising honesty, and comic vision. Philip Rothdescribed it as “a brave, open book, harsh, dogged, and relentless, aconfession burning through the contours of a novel.”

BostonUniversity was an important part of Gold’s own long dry season and ahappy observer of his triumphant return. A New Yorker by birth,inclination, and writer’s voice, he moved, with his wife, Vera, toBoston in 1974 to teach in the Arts and Sciences Creative Writing Program and taught writing, along with the occasional modern novelcourse, through Metropolitan College until the fall 2007 semesterended. A vital part of Boston’s community of writers — according to theBoston Globe, he helped found the Writers’ Room of Boston, whichprovides affordable workspace to emerging and established writers — heasked distinguished friends to teach the last few classes and gradedpapers in his hospital bed.

Gold’s wife haddied in 2004. He and his cats continued to live in an apartmentvirtually on campus, so that his circle of admiring friends included,along with students and colleagues, those who came to know him morecasually. “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, adirector, and a playwright, described as “delving remorselessly intothe death of his parents, which occurred in quick succession, and hisown gradual debilitation, describing in finite detail and with surgicalclarity the parts of his metabolism that were failing him, the keymedical terms employed to chronicle their regression.” His workremained tough and clear-sighted. “His body had become his overridingtheme 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.