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By Kent Williams, Iowa City
Joseph Dobrian died on Nov. 22, but his obituary wasn’t published until Dec. 12. To most people in Iowa City, he was the guest columnist at the Iowa City Press Citizen most likely to piss people off with his opinions. It isn’t hard to see why if you take a stroll through the PC’s archive of his column.
But that isn’t his whole story. I first got to know Joseph in the late 1970s. He was in a group of writers who met informally — on Joseph’s front porch if the weather was nice — to discuss our writing.
He was a classic Iowa City character. You knew within five minutes of meeting him that he was unusual, and not in that classic Iowa City “everyone’s crazy and we’re having a great time” way. Everything bothered Joseph, except his cats and his cigarettes.
As much as he liked smoking, he’d have none of the Marlboros smoked by the hoi polloi. He loved the weird Russian cigarettes with three-inch long filters, or Balkan Sobranies. Their smoke smelled like a pile of burning telephone poles, and he reveled in their acridity.
He very clearly had a hard time with emotional relationships. He once told me that his favorite come-on line to women was, “I’m going to break every bone in your pelvis.” He also told me once that the ideal woman was “3 feet tall, with a flat head you could set a beer on.” I think those were jokes, but there was a deep river of misogyny running through him.
He was quite intelligent. He was absorbing to speak with because he was thinking as he played chess: thinking several moves left, but still listening and reacting. A misogynist and misanthrope, you could hardly call him prejudiced because his simmering resentment of all humanity left no one out. His scorn was global. At the same time, he could be wickedly funny. I couldn’t help but laugh, sometimes more in disbelief at the edgy things he found funny. His jokes could leave a mark.
He was an articulate, careful writer. He could forge a perfect sentence, whose beauty belied the underlying ugliness. He lived in New York for years, writing about boxing for the Sporting News, and (purportedly) the Wall Street Journal. At some point he ended up back in Iowa City, where he spent his final years writing novels about a middle-aged man who alienated everyone he met with his smug superiority and sharp tongue.
I wasn’t around for his transformation from whip-smart, annoying young person into a bitter old crank. By the time I realized he was living here, the transformation was complete. I tried reconnecting with him, but the first time I disagreed with him in a Facebook comment, he blocked me.
The cracks in his facade had long since become canyons. In one of his PC essays he said, “My publisher, Rex Imperator, has only a small stable of authors and zero marketing clout.” The small stable of authors was Joseph Dobrian, solamente. He set up his own vanity press in the vain hope that people would think he had convinced a real publisher to print his books.
The University of Iowa Libraries have a blanket policy of not buying vanity press books. Joseph so wanted to be in that library that he would “return” copies of his own books, hoping they’d be cataloged and shelved there.
And his political opinions pieces in the Press-Citizen were so transparently awful they were required reading. I think they kept printing his pieces because, in the words of a former PC editor, “they inspired debate.” He railed in fussily elegant prose about feminists, liberals, queers and Black people.
Whatever spikey brilliance he’d shown in his youth that had kept his friends from strangling him was gone, replaced by a doctrinaire adherence to the kind of bitter rightwing nonsense that defines the opinions displayed on Fox News.
When his own ambitions for himself came to naught, he turned into a horrible, nasty jerk. He had some friends among my acquaintances, but you had to forgive a lot to be around him.
And still, he was a human being. I’d catch sight of him from time to time in the grocery store, dressed always in his Chauncey Gardner drag (black suit, white shirt and bowler). Always solitary, always wary, never interacting. The older he got the more his suits became threadbare and wrinkled.
I felt, and feel, deep sympathy for him. What happened in his life that made him walk his lonely road of contempt and simmering anger? What did someone do to him to make him so horrible? What made him be so painfully, obviously dishonest with himself and others? Why was he so comprehensively, crazy-makingly obtuse?
When we were young, I could be optimistic that a person of his intelligence and talents would grow up, lose the sharp edges and join humanity. But he never did.
He died, as he lived, alone except for his cats.
A shorter version of this letter was published in Little Village’s January 2025 issue.