Ivan Gold, at 75; was celebrated writer and educator

IVAN GOLD (Vera Gold)

Accolades from the literary firmament began raining on Ivan Gold when he was a college student, and he did not know a drought lay ahead.

He slouched in embarrassment at Columbia University in the early 1950s when his professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren, set aside the cannon of great books one day to say the class should discuss a story Mr. Gold had written.

The plaudits continued in 1963 when Mr. Gold published "Nickel Miseries," a book of short stories and novellas. Lionel Trilling, a preeminent critic, said the "masterly" collection showed the kind of promise that "will make Mr. Gold one of the commanding writers of our time."

Alcoholism eroded Mr. Gold's output: He published only two more books. But in 1990 he ended a silence of 21 years with the publication of "Sams in a Dry Season," a novel hailed by Philip Roth and Robert Stone. Mr. Gold completed a final book before dying on Dec. 23 in the Neville Center nursing and rehabilitation facility in Cambridge. He was 75 and had prostate cancer.

"People were saying, 'How can anyone live up to that kind of remark?' And I came to internalize it," he said of Trilling's praise in a 1990 interview with The Washington Post. "He didn't do me any favors, and yet he certainly meant to."

After his first novel, "Sick Friends," was published in 1969, "there was a long wet period for me," Mr. Gold, who lived for 30 years off Kenmore Square, told the Associated Press in 1990. "I drank myself out of any possible career."

Instead, he slipped into a life few would have envisioned for him, least of all Mr. Gold. He taught writing at Boston University and helped found The Writers' Room, a haven in the Back Bay that provides affordable workspace. He took his last drink in August 1976 and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.

And setting aside anonymity, he turned his life into art with the autobiographical "Sams in a Dry Season," chronicling an alcoholic writer's final days of drinking and hesitant steps into sobriety.

"This is a brave, open book, harsh, dogged, and relentless, a confession bursting through the contours of a novel, convincingly truthful and inventively written," Roth wrote.

The writer Dan Wakefield, who took Van Doren's class at Columbia with Mr. Gold, called his longtime friend "a pure writer" who was "totally committed to his writing and his work. He was a perfectionist, which I think is one of the things that explains why he didn't have a greater output. But the output he did have, in my opinion, showed superb craftsmanship and a real love of language and respect for language."

Of Mr. Gold's "The Nickel Misery of George Washington Carver Brown," Wakefield said: "I could recite the first sentence of that story; it was such a great sentence in my mind."

The novella begins: "The day that Carver Brown fell backward from the freshly painted pinnacle of failure (setting even for him a new low) was the day before Thanksgiving Day: it dawned in frozen reds and blues, without portent."

In an interview, Stone said, " 'Nickel Miseries' was a great collection of stories," and added that "anybody who is really good always raises the bar, and he was really good."

Though Mr. Gold lived in Boston nearly half his life, and the city figures prominently in his two novels, he often wrote in a cadence that reflected both his upbringing in New York's Lower East Side and the writer he most admired.

"Very early on in his career, even in high school, he was very influenced by William Faulkner, and the style he developed was very Faulknerian," said the writer Charles Marowitz, a friend since junior high.

"He went in for long convoluted sentences where a thought would link to the next thought and the thought after that without a series of gaps," Marowitz said. "It really was like a flow of water. It had a sort of remorseless fluency about it which was very much like what happens in our own minds when we're dealing with particular issues. We don't think in short declarative bursts."

Drawing deeply from his own life for source material, Mr. Gold found plentiful source material. Reviewing "Sams in a Dry Season," the Chicago Tribune called it "the first of a new literary genre, the frankly semi-fictional confession that contains both a fictional and a 'real' authorial self."

Even those who saw themselves or others in his books were not put off by Mr. Gold's unsparing portraits.

"I admired his prose and I admired his honesty," said his sister, Judith Stitzel of Morgantown, W.Va. "It seems to me that his ethical concerns and his aesthetic concerns, they really came from the same place. There was a scrupulous honesty, sometimes a chastening honesty - a bracing honesty, with himself as well as with anybody else. When he was being hard on someone I would think, 'Yes, but he's being just as hard on himself.' "

Possessed of a mordant sense of humor, Mr. Gold was sensitive to the ironies in life not always apparent to others.

"He certainly had a kind of gruff exterior, but he was a very funny, witty man," said his son, Ian of Dorchester.

Mr. Gold wrote for many years in The Writers' Room, where he was president for many years. At home, he converted an angular pantry into an office, glancing upward from his papers through a window that looked out at Fenway Park's Green Monster.

As his health declined he finished his last work, which he called "a novel memoir," from a desk in his bedroom overlooking the Charles River.

He had nursed his wife, Vera, through her battle with leukemia until she died nearly four years ago. And in his last days, Mr. Gold remained a devoted teacher, correcting papers and using a computer to enter final grades from his bed in healthcare facilities.

"I was always amazed at the relationships he formed with students," said his sister, herself a retired college literature teacher. "It was a sense of not exactly discipleship, not exactly guru, but people recognized in him the person who could teach them. Those relationships were awe inspiring in many ways, and very moving"

In addition to his son and sister, Mr. Gold leaves two granddaughters.

A service will be held at 1 p.m. Feb. 23 in First Church in Boston.