I am reading a book called The Nick Tosches Reader which reprints an interview the author did with Patti Smith for Penthouse magazine in 1976. When Tosches asks her about some of her favorite woman writers, she mentions two: Anna Kavan and Iris Sarazan. Since I work in a bookstore, I immediately went to see if we have books by these two authors. Anna Kavan, I recalled, wrote the science fiction novel Ice (I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard it’s great and I ordered one for our store). But the second author Smith cited does not seem to exist!
Smith says: “Another great woman writer is Iris Sarazan, who wrote The Runaway. She considered herself a mare, a wild runaway. She was a really intelligent girl stuck in all these convents with a hungry mind. I identify with her ’cause of her hunger to go beyond herself. She wound up in prison, but she escaped and wrote some great books before kicking off. Her books aren’t page after page of her beating her breast about how shitty she’s been treated, they’re books about her exciting telescoping plans of escape. Rhythm, great wild rhythm…” (pp. 72-73 of The Nick Tosches Reader)
I have at this point searched every source I can think of available to our bookstore and the wider Internet community and have come up short on even confirming that The Runaway by Iris Sarazan exists, even if it’s long out of print. There are of course hundreds of books called “The Runaway,” but every result for the name “Iris Sarazan” in quotation marks on DuckDuckGo leads to an instance of the Patti Smith quote above.
Did Tosches mishear Smith and transcribe the author’s name wrong in 1976, whereafter Penthouse’s crack fact-checking department had a rare lapse?
Was Smith just messing with Tosches?
Point of complication: There is a second interview with Patti Smith in The Nick Tosches Reader, from Creem magazine in 1978, which Tosches admits in an author’s note was completely made up by him with no input from Patti Smith other than her giving him permission to do it! So is Tosches putting a fake book in interview #1 as a sly signal that it is also fraudulent?
At this point I am in a state of delightful perplexity, but I would also love to know if anyone has any light at all to shed here? Anyone heard of Iris Sarazan and/or The Runaway? Or does it remind anyone of another book called like The Runaround by Ibis Salazar or something that could have been garbled along the way? The importance of this question to my bookstore is low, but its grip on my brain is tight indeed!
by Snus_Goose