After resurrecting Elaine Dundy’s very funny The Dud Avacado (introduction by Terry Teachout) from near oblivion and sending it out to vibrant new life, Edwin Frank at the wonderful New York Review Classics is about to rescue another almost forgotten comic masterpiece: Iris Owens’ 1973 novel, After Claude.
It’s a book I know well. How could I not? I think I must have typed the damn thing, what? … maybe twice, three times? Iris Owens was a good friend through most of the seventies, and she was by far the best blocked writer I have ever known in a lifetime of knowing writers. She was brilliant. She was seductive. She was very interesting to talk to, and she was even funnier than she was interesting. She had a large, unmissable talent. And she was breathtakingly unproductive.
I was only one of many friends who wanted to see that talent flower. And I worked at it. I insisted. I inveighed. I ranted. For God’s sake, Iris, work! It won’t kill you! Write! Don’t you have at least something to start with?
The year was 1970, and well, yes. Iris did have… something. A scrap. The very beginning of what might be … something. Just a first sentence…and a little more.
Okay. Somthing is something. So, let’s see it.
Amazingly, she let me see it. Iris handed me one battered page. Every single word on that page had been ruthlessly crossed out, except for the first six words at the top. The first sentence. They alone were still standing. They were:
“Claude left me, the French rat.”
I burst into loud laughter, and told Iris that it was essential that she keep going. She had to make that one little sentence into a book.
Three years later—three very long years—After Claude was done and published by Farrar, Straus to raucously appreciative reviews. During those three years, I had acted as the book’s—let’s call it “enabler.” My role was to cajole, encourage, laugh, argue, type, hope, cheer, groan, and above all listen, listen for many, many hours as Iris explained yet again, in ever-more-nuanced Proustian detail, why it was absolutely out of the question –-absurd—even to think of actually writing this week.
Yet what she produced at long last is wonderful. Hilarious. And a little scary.
If Iris had followed up on After Claude as I hoped she would, I believe she would be recognized now as one of the comic talents of her era, a kind of female, more sardonic, Woody Allen. But that would have meant a lot of writing, a rapid succession books, eight or ten in as many years, in which she mined the uniquely amusing mother-lode of her persona, a little like the way Allen mined his.
Out of the question? Absurd?
Whatever it was, it was not to be.
She’ gone now, and After Claude is pretty much all that’s left. But that’s a lot, and hallelujah! NYRB Classics will publish it in October.
Stay tuned.