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  • Personal Memories of the ‘Other’ Irving That I Knew
  • Georgie Anne Geyer (bio)

Many of the friends and enemies of Irving Louis Horowitz would remember him as a gruff, take-no-prisoners, and often didactic man. His loves were irrepressible, and so were his hatreds. For Irving, the middle ground was merely intellectual quicksand, designed to draw in and destroy one’s integrity. But you knew from the get-go that this was not a man whose realities you could afford to ignore. Indeed, the minute you saw his big, bulky figure stride into the room, you knew you were in the presence of a mensch. Or was it perhaps a bear? Whichever, ‘Bear’ became his fond nickname.

In the many times I had seen him over the last thirty years or so, I saw a man quite different from the argumentative figure that many saw and loved—or hated. Oh, we talked a lot about Cuba, but we didn’t argue because we both felt the same: that Fidel Castro was a charismatic figure who had thrown the Cuban people under the yoke of authoritarian, tyrannical rule. Irving and I merely argued about the details.

Then, in the last three years, I was blessed to see another side of this truly remarkable man—the infinitely kind, emotional, and even sentimental side of the Bear.

I had not seen Irving or Mary for a long time, our lives having taken different directions, but in the winter of 2009, Frank Calzon, a Cuban-American who was devoted to Irving, phoned to tell me that our friend was in town and wanted to take a group of us outlier Cuba-lovers to lunch. I was delighted.

As we sat around a circular table at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, DC, everyone was chattering away except me. The reason was clear. Two years earlier, because of shamelessly careless dental work on the part of my dentists, I, a non-smoker all my life, had been diagnosed with tongue cancer. I ended up more-or-less alive after a ten-hour operation, but with a distinct slur in my speech. Irving knew this, and so, [End Page 368] with his profound capacity for helping anyone who appeared wrongfully wounded, he would have none of my being cut out of the discussion.

At one point, with his natural bearing of a leader, he simply broke into the conversation and announced, using my nickname, ‘Gee Gee, I am going to publish a book of your columns!’

Everyone stopped. Everything stopped. Irving had that effect. He was the lead Bear, and he played the role brilliantly. I tried to remonstrate with him—compilations of columns did not sell—but he insisted, and I left that day as a happy—if still speechless—woman.

It was difficult to get the columns together. Syndicates are really agents for newspaper talents, like foreign correspondents or columnists in Washington or even advice columnists, whose articles are then sold to many papers, making these talents available at low cost to smaller papers. But we only started putting my columns on the Internet in the 1990s. Before that, I had to find the ones I wanted in the clipped newspaper files I kept in my office. By now, most of them were dog-eared and cat-scratched. Corners were ripped off. I would look at one and ask myself, ‘Did I really write that? Good Lord, why did I write that?’

My trusted assistant of twenty-five years, Rita Tiwari, and I worked day and night to get the best articles together, but at least many were already on the headline archive on the Web, which were easy to find. I thought I was very clever, indeed, to devise a code to indicate those that were clippings and those that were on the Web, but when the entire huge bundle reached Irving, I truly thought he might collapse.

Again, here, he was immensely thoughtful. He said that he never helped an author with copying something and preparing it for printing. Not ever. Transaction Publishers simply did not have enough staff for this. Then, bless him, Jeffrey Stetz, Transaction’s technological genius, stepped forward...

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