After Claude was on the list of books Ruth and I made in the summer of 2011, when we first had the idea for Emily Books. More than two years later, we have a much clearer idea of what “our thing” is: unjustly neglected one-of-a-kind books by women and other weirdos. But back then all we knew was that we wanted to sell books we loved via subscription; we hadn’t thought a lot, yet, about why we loved the books we loved, and what it would mean to share them.
Turns out, though, that After Claude is quintessentially “our thing,” though it’s not exactly neglected: as a beloved NYRB Classic, it’s already a “cult classic” by anyone’s estimation. When we got permission to feature the book, we set out to dig a little deeper into its appeal, and the biography of its author. Emily Praeger’s introduction to their 2010 edition gave some tantalizing hints: “I am honored to write this introduction for Iris’s book but I think you should know she and I were not speaking,” it begins, and goes on to explain why, a little.
We got a slightly better sense of the woman who created Harried Daimler after I interviewed her longtime friend, the writer and teacher Stephen Koch. In our interview, which is available exclusively via our iOS 7 app, Stephen described Iris’s early career writing pornographic potboilers for the notorious Olympia Press, explained what it was like to spend time with Iris, the “spell” she cast over her acolytes and friends, its dual emboldening and crippling effects on his work and life. He also describes a series of events that led him to become the “father” of After Claude, which I found stunning and fascinating. I’d also love to hear Iris’s side, but she died in 2008, leaving only this novel and one other, 1984’s Hope Diamond Refuses.
The book has aged extremely badly, in some respects: Iris’s Harriet is what people who want to excuse bigotry and racism often call an “equal-opportunity offender.” But in other respects it is strikingly contemporary, with its depiction of unequal sexual relationships and manipulative, Svengali-ish creeps. The 1970s doesn’t have a monopoly on those types of dudes, unfortunately. And the novel’s denouement in the Chelsea Hotel, with its hallucinatory description of sexual release, is … look, we tried. We really did. But all the context in the world can’t prepare you; you just have to read it.
