Ira Levin

Ira Levin: The Swiss Watchmaker of Dread

Stephen King, who knows something about the business, settled the question of what Ira Levin was for: he called him the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel, and added that "every novel he has ever written has been a marvel of plotting." Levin wrote seven of them in more than forty years. Out of that small output came a horror masterpiece, the founding text of feminist horror, the longest-running comedy thriller in Broadway history, and — rarest of all — a word that entered the English language and stayed.

Manhattan, the Bronx, a Toy Importer's Son

He was born on 27 August 1929 in Manhattan to a Russian-Jewish family and grew up between Manhattan and the Bronx. His father, Charles, imported toys. Levin went to the Horace Mann School, then to Drake University from 1946 to 1948, and finished at New York University in 1950 with a major in philosophy and English literature. He remained, all his life, a Jewish atheist — a fact worth noting about the man who wrote the most effective Satanism novel in American literature.

The CBS Contest

While still at NYU he won a CBS scriptwriting contest. The winning script was produced as "The Old Woman," an episode of the anthology series *The Clock*, broadcast on 1 December 1950. Training films, radio and television scripts followed. From 1953 to 1955 he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the Korean War, which is to say he spent the war writing.

A Kiss Before Dying

His first novel appeared in 1953, when he was twenty-four. *A Kiss Before Dying* took the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1954. It announced the method he would use for the rest of his life: a plot engineered so tightly that the reveal reorganises everything preceding it.

Broadway

The theatre came next and never entirely left. *No Time for Sergeants* (1955), a Broadway comedy he adapted, starred Andy Griffith and jump-started his career. *Critic's Choice* followed in 1960, *Dr. Cook's Garden* in 1968, *Veronica's Room* in 1974. Then, in 1978, *Deathtrap*, which became the longest-running comedy thriller in Broadway history and won him another Edgar. It was filmed in 1982 with Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine.

Rosemary

*Rosemary's Baby* (1967) set a novel about Satanism in an apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side and let a young pregnant woman work out, slowly, what her neighbours and her husband had arranged. Britannica calls it flatly "a horror masterpiece." Roman Polanski's 1968 film, with Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, won Ruth Gordon an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The novel's power comes from an absolute refusal to tip its hand: every event has a mundane explanation available, right up to the point where it doesn't.

The Word He Invented

*This Perfect Day* (1970) was a dystopia of enforced contentment; it later won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1992. Then came *The Stepford Wives* (1972), which Levin had first conceived as a play. A woman relocates to a suburb where the wives are unnervingly subservient. Britannica identifies it as the first feminist horror novel and a seminal work in the form — a critique of consumerist society and of the backlash against feminism, delivered as a genre thriller. It was filmed in 1975 and remade in 2004, and its title turned into a common adjective. Very few novelists add a word to the dictionary.

*The Boys from Brazil* followed in 1976. After a long gap came *Sliver* (1991), filmed in 1993, and *Son of Rosemary* (1997), a late sequel to his most famous book.

Why Ira Is Called a Genius

The faculty in question is plot construction of an almost mathematical purity, and King's phrase identifies it exactly. A Levin novel is a mechanism: every component is placed early, in plain sight, disguised as ordinary domestic furniture — a neighbour, a suburb, a husband's new job — and the machine only becomes visible once it has closed. The signature effect is that a rational explanation and a paranoid one stay equally available for as long as possible, so the reader does the work of dread on the author's behalf. That is why *Rosemary's Baby* still functions on a reader who already knows the ending, and why *A Kiss Before Dying* won its Edgar on structure alone.

Two further claims support the case. The first is range: the same writer produced Broadway's longest-running comedy thriller and the modern horror novel's most imitated template, forms that reward almost opposite instincts. The second is that he changed the language. "Stepford" is now used by people who have never read the book or seen either film — a durability of idea that outlives the sentences that carried it.

The honest counter-case starts with volume. Seven novels across four decades is a slender shelf, and the reputation rests almost entirely on the run from *Rosemary's Baby* in 1967 to *The Boys from Brazil* in 1976. The honours are genre honours — multiple Edgars, the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1996, the Prometheus Hall of Fame — not the prizes that confer literary standing, and nobody has ever argued for Levin on the strength of his prose, his characters or his ideas as such. Even the social criticism of *The Stepford Wives*, sharp as its premise is, works by premise rather than analysis: it states a thesis with a single brilliant image and then executes the thriller. What Levin had was engineering, at a level almost nobody in the field has matched. It is a genuine kind of genius and a strictly bounded one, and it is the kind that other writers, who can see the joins in each other's work, are quickest to acknowledge.

Legacy

Levin married Gabrielle Aronsohn in 1960; they had three sons, Adam, Jared and Nicholas, and divorced in 1968. A second marriage, to Phyllis Sugarman, lasted from 1979 to 1981; she died in 2006. He had four grandchildren. He died of a heart attack at his Manhattan home on 12 November 2007, aged 78.

The books have outlasted almost all their contemporaries, mostly because they were built rather than written. Half a century on, a pregnant woman in a good apartment building and a wife in a spotless suburban kitchen remain two of the most reliable images of terror in American popular culture, and both belong to a New Yorker who preferred to let the mechanism do the frightening.

Achievements

• Notable work: Rosemary's Baby
• Notable work: The Stepford Wives
• Genres: speculative fiction