Loose Threads: Ira Silverberg

The train pulls into Bellport, a small station with one platform, on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon. At Penn Station people were boarding the Long Island Rail Road, heading to the coast for one last day on the beach before winter settles into the city. Bellport is nestled on the southern shore of Long Island, just before you reach the Hamptons, gently resting up against the ocean. You can hear the waves from Ira Silverberg’s house as he welcomes Drake’s into his home.  

A leading figure in New York’s literary scene since the 1980s, he moved out here fulltime during the pandemic, in search of a bit more space. Ira is something of a literary renaissance man: he’s been an agent, publisher, editor, and publicity director. He’s held jobs as various as the Literature Director of National Endowment for the Arts under Barack Obama, and the VIP doorman at the Limelight, where he moonlighted while starting out. 

It was a chance meeting at a club one evening that led him to the world books, dropping out of a law degree and moving to Kansas to live with legendary Beat writer William Burroughs. “William fed me books,” Ira says of that formative time, “and unbeknownst to me then, influenced an aesthetic that was to set the tone for the kind of writing I’d wind up working with throughout my career.”  

His introduction to the world of literature was through one of the most radical voices of the 20th century, and his career has continued in the same vein since: he became the publicity director, and later Editor-in-Chief of Grove Press, which had been a relentless supporter the literary avant-garde since the 50s, before launching High Risk books, which was dedicated to publishing innovative and subversive literature from the likes of Lynne Tillman, Gary Indiana, and Kathy Acker. At a moment when the economics of publishing are increasingly strained, Silverberg’s career stands as a reminder of a time when risk was still an integral part of the cultural conversation. 

“In Kansas William Burroughs fed me books and, unbeknownst to me then, influenced an aesthetic that was to set the tone for the kind of writing I’d wind up working with.”

Let’s start at the very beginning. And I think that might be your time with William Burroughs. He was really your entrance in the world of literature and publishing.   

Ira: I was in my second year of a six-year BA/JD programme when I met James Grauerholz,  Burroughs’s amanuensis at The Bar, a gay hangout on 2nd Avenue and 4th Street. It was 1981 and the East Village hadn’t been gentrified yet. We walked to The Bowery, climbed over a sleeping drunk in front of where he was staying, and James opened a pad lock on the wrought iron gates that kept the drunks on the sidewalk rather than in the entryway.  

I didn’t really take in the importance of the space until I got up in the morning and there was William sitting in a suit and tie having tea and toast at this big conference table surrounded by orange Naugahyde chairs. “You must be a new friend of James. My name is William, welcome to The Bunker,” he said, in a somewhat sinister midwestern drawl that threw me. I’d read Naked Lunch in high school, I was aware of his presence and influence, especially on the downtown scene. Keep in mind I was an 18-year-old kid from the Bronx so this wasn’t like meeting Grace Jones or Klaus Nomi – I got that kind of celebrity. This was deeper somehow, and darker, also literally: the Bunker was essentially windowless. I wound up spending a lot of time there that spring and summer until the end of the year, when I left school, quit my job selling clothing at Charivari, and split for life with James in Lawrence, Kansas, where William had moved earlier that year.   

William, aside from being kind of my mother-in-law, fed me books, and unbeknownst to me then, influenced an aesthetic that was to set the tone for the kind of writing that I’d wind up working with. I began to understand managing artists by listening to James’s calls, being a part of the conversation at almost-nightly dinners at William’s, and being part of the family as friends and colleagues of William’s began to make the pilgrimage to see him in Kansas.   

I lived there for two years, then came back to New York but stayed in William and James’s world. I organised Burroughs's 70th birthday party at the very new Limelight nightclub. A 300 person, seated dinner with guests ranging from Sting to Kurt Vonnegut, Dianne Brill to Allen Ginsberg.  

I’d started working in publishing already by then, at Overlook Press. Publishing pay in the mid 1980s was the pits. I was making $10k a year. So, I worked weekends as the VIP Doorman at the Limelight. I was supposed to be finishing some kind of degree in the midst of all of that. That's the thing that slipped through the grate, but it didn’t get in the way of teaching in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia – at least not until Drake’s puts it on a scarf.  

You spent a formative time of your career at Grove Press. 

It was the place I dreamed of working. My understanding of myself and the world was better defined through reading what they published, Burroughs, Duras, Sade, Genet, Fanon, Selby. It fought some of the most important censorship battles in the 20th century over books like Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, Lady Chatterley's Lover. It was run by a mad genius and terrible businessman called Barney Rosset, who was always putting financial Band-Aids on the ever-haemorrhaging house.  

I’d met him at Burroughs’s 70th and pestered him about jobs whenever they came up, Andrew Wylie, then at the start of his career as an agent called me and said: “Barney has money now. Get down there.” I did, and Barney asked me what I could do. I was 22. I must have said something vaguely competent in reply because he gave me a job heading up the publicity department.  

That was 1985. I was part of a group of younger folks who loved the idea of Grove as a place to break talent that challenged the culture. Kathy Acker was already there. I helped to bring Dennis Cooper in. Gary Indiana joined the list, and that thing that became known as transgressive fiction began to look like something.  

I ended up back at Grove as Editor-in-Chief later. I was able to bring Burroughs back before his death in 1997 and got the Jacqueline Susann backlist, recasting her as a proto-feminist, and Valley of the Dolls outstripped Waiting for Godot as the house’s best-selling title. A perverse prize, that. 

One day Andrew Wylie called with Allen Ginsberg’s last three books on offer.  He wanted $100,000. When Wylie asks for a number, you give it to him or the books go to auction. Publishing was a lot of theatre in those days, and Wylie was publishing’s PT Barnum. Morgan suggested we offer $60,000 and let’s just say someone at the Wylie Agency, not Andrew but an employee of his, whom I revile, ran an auction in which I was asked to bid against myself and refused. We lost the books and I decided, fuck it, I’m becoming an agent and am going to put my energy into making money for people not publishers. 

“Grove Press was the place I always dreamed of working. My understanding of myself and the world was better defined through reading what they published.”

When you ran High Risk Books you published a lot of writers who I think have become more and more revered as time has gone on: Lynne Tillman, Gary Indiana, Cookie Mueller, John Giorno. A lot of those writers you worked with then feel increasingly relevant for a younger generation too. I saw there was a bit of a retrospective of that work at the Swiss Institute at the moment.   

The installation artist Costanza Candeloro and Licit Illicit Bookshop had been creating curated reading rooms at museums across Europe. This is the first American one. I was surprised, and moved, that it focussed on our work at High Risk. It was incredibly poignant that the opening was on the same night as David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud Series at the Leslie–Lohman Museum in Soho. A lot of the writers Amy and I published were gone – AIDS, mostly. So, to see their work held up as cultural markers, and to think, “Hey, we really did that during that horrible time in our individual and collective lives. We got that work out,” was a balm given current conditions. But Cookie Mueller, Gary Indiana, Kathy Acker, June Jordan, Essex Hemphill, they’re still gone. The rebellious work, however, has a half-life. All of those writers have seen posthumous resurgences of interest that are enormously satisfying to witness. 

What about when you were an agent? What happened with the JT LeRoy, or Laura Albert, lawsuit and the strange chain of events around it.  

I was “JT’s” second agent. I was one of scores of people who bought the Punk Peter Pan mythology that that woman cooked up. It was smack in the middle of the worst part of the AIDS epidemic, and she played the AIDS card, the recovering junky card, the former sexworker card, the abuse card, the trans card. She should have made a transgressive tarot deck, she might have made more money!  

We all bought it though. It wasn’t a very well thought out hoax, just desperate ambition. If she was smarter, she wouldn’t have signed a film deal that attached, as a contractual point, that the autobiography of the writer “JT LeRoy” was key to the marketing of the film. So, when she was found out, the producer sued her. 

It was a bad suit for many reasons. Both sides were trying to depose me, which is worse than actually testifying. I dodged the depositions but wound up on the stand and saw her for perhaps the first time since I found out that she was the actual writer of those books. She’d had a lot of work done. The whole thing was appalling. I had my first, and only, DUI that night. I was in upstate New York, where I never drove after dark. I drank a lot that night, and, apparently,  had popped an Ambien. I woke up in the emergency room having destroyed a car but I was pretty much fine. The next morning was my daughter’s third birthday.   

Despite that, I always try to find some redeeming quality in the people I’ve fallen out with. Usually, it's in their work. In her case, it’s in her essence, a scam artist. I watched her scam an extra room for me at La Colombe D’or during the Cannes Film Festival. That and listening to her abuse fashion publicists on the phone was awfully amusing, “Send someone down from Paris with those shoes so JT can walk the red carpet in them.”  They probably wound up on eBay after she clomped around in them a few times.   

Silverberg is a generous host. After some warm welcomes, he leads us out into his garden, decorated with Tibetan prayer flags, where he’s prepared a lunch of local vegetables, salads, and cold white wine. Chipmunks are playing in the hedges. Ira is a natural raconteur, dropping stories about the great and the difficult, downtown legends and the literary titans, with a playful mixture of affection and candour.  

His path, from a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx through the world of publishing, speaks to a sustained, restless curiosity. “Publishing is cultural work as well as a commercial business,” he says. “We tend to marginalise the difficult ones, but they often create the most important work.” 

What’s striking now is how engaged he still is with contemporary literature, in small presses doing interesting things, in the work of younger publishers trying to start something of their own, discovering new writing and writers.  

And after you were an agent, you worked for the National Endowment for the Arts.   

After the whole LeRoy thing, I was pretty through. So, when I got the appointment as Literature Director at the National Endowment for the Arts, I had my ticket out. I went down to Washington in 2011 during the Obama years. Those were very hopeful times. But in reality the NEA had been gutted during the culture wars of the 90s.  The people who “saved” it, left it hamstrung by restrictions were embedded everywhere in the agency.  

And you’re still teaching at Columbia? And also teaching in prisons I believe.   

I teach in the MFA writing Program one semester each year.  I alternate annually between a course on the Beats during their time at Columbia and the work I’m closest to,  Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, Dennis Cooper. They’re the canonical writers for me.   

An organisation I worked with, Unconditional Freedom, was doing a prison program and so we went to the largest women’s prison in the states, if not the world, the California Correctional Facility for Women in Chowchilla, CA. We worked with women in maximum security, some of whom had been incarcerated in their teens and were now in their sixties.  Some of them had had their death sentences commuted to life without parole. It was an incredibly profound experience that I’m grateful to have had.  

When you meet these women, an old prison adage makes a lot of sense: most women in prison either did it for their man, or to their man. You don’t find too many masterminds of international money laundering so much as you find people who were already living on the margins and were only trying to make ends meet when they met a new end, incarceration. 

The stories were almost always rooted in domestic abuse,  and childhood trauma.The work wasn’t “teaching literature”; it was about facilitating voice. Everything I’d learned in publishing became useful there. It was the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done.

“The work with women in prison wasn’t ‘teaching literature’; it was about facilitating voice. Everything I’d learned in publishing became useful there.”

How do you feel about fashion at the moment? You’ve got great style.   

Thank you.  I was really lucky to get a job at one of the Charivari stores on the Upper West Side when I was in high school. Being around that at a young age was definitely influential.   

But when Covid hit, I sold off a lot of clothes and accessories, particularly anything Vuitton, Gucci, Hermes, or Prada. The whole thing seems like a scam to me now. Once I thought my Vuitton Damier Messenger bag was a signifier of success at the Frankfurt Book Fair, now I see it as consumerist Lemmingism.   

That said, I still like a good suit. Andrew Wylie always dresses beautifully — proper shoes, good tailoring. But there’s very little I regret selling, and what’s left I’ve mostly been giving it away.  

I bought a Prada suit in the 90’s  that I remember wearing to a party on Governor’s Island to launch a Russian Vodka. It was the beginning of the end, the oligarchs were hiring Duran Duran to play from a barge. So I wore the red Prada suit with a moorish pattern woven into it.  It seemed somehow perfect but I haven’t fit into that thing in years. I gave it to a former Columbia student who’s now Maya Hawke’s assistant. I  told him I wanted to see him wearing it in the background of a paparazzi photo.