The Age of Happy Problems by Herbert Gold. Dial Press. 1962. 238pp. $4.95.

Author. Herbert Gold, a native of Cleveland, has published five novels, of which the most recent is Therefore Be Bold. His sixth, Salt, to be published in early 1963, is laid in Cleveland.

The happy inspiration for the title of this unhappy book comes, as inspiration so often comes nowadays, from a television editor, who said to Herbert Gold: "No more downbeat dramas! We want happy stories about happy people with happy problems."

Mr. Gold then gives a useful illustration: "The ideal type of the happy problem is represented by the issue facing that handsome couple in the automobile advertisement, all gowned and tuxedoed, smiling at each other and wondering what kind of an evening it will be, while the baby-sitter broods benevolently in the background: 'Shall we take the Cadillac tonight?'"

Accordingly, this is an intensely American book, a collection of diagnostic essays written with sympathy, and out of the shrewd and exact sense of where the scalpel must be applied in order to cut deep. Mr. Gold is a novelist of considerable stature and considerable achievement: all the more reason for paying attention to him when he is writing in his own person.

Independent Responses

From the first page of the introduction the reader must learn to expect that Mr. Gold's responses to the American are going to be entirely independent, and, if necessary, idiosyncratic: he is not afraid to stand alone in his judgments. "This is a report," he says, "about where one man stands alone on some matters of teaching, learning, writing, love, marriage, work, and the prospect of death, and how he came to this stand in the cities of America." Sometimes, after the American fashion, The Age of Happy Problems, strikes the reader as being more of a confession than a mere report, a confession undertaken for the purpose not only of purging but of defining the self. The book is divided into two parts, "American Events," and "American Places"; in fact, these might perhaps more exactly be called, "What Have I Done," and "Where Have I Been." Since Mr. Gold is an interesting and more than interesting man, his book compels attention as a series of chapters of autobiography. And yet, after reading these sixteen essays in the exploration of the ego, the novelistic instinct had succeeded in bringing about the shock of recognition: the essays are symptomatic not of one man but of us all.

As an observer of the contemporary scene Mr. Gold is, as I am suggesting, a novelist. And as a novelist he is a Melville rather than a Trollope: at least he is - in aspiration - metaphysical rather than social in his interests and sympathies. That is to say, he is entirely American in his no doubt romantic longing for synthesis, certainty, faith. His career is a quest; and he does, without any doubt, bring some formidable talents and accomplishments with him on his journey of discovery. One delights in the energetic intelligence which Mr. Gold brings to bear on the subjects which he treats - and the sympathy as well; but one is finally disappointed that the great purpose of his immense journey seems, at the last, no nearer. Whether we should blame Mr. Gold for not having got further is perhaps so American a question, which lies so deeply stitched in the American way of life, that it can be answered not by a reviewer, but must await the judgment of the archaeologists several hundred years from now.

These reflections spring from a consideration of one of the best essays in the book, "Death in Miami Beach." As a piece of reporting it is much more than merely good. Mr. Gold depicts with sad poignancy the pall of mortality beneath the suntans and the vulgarity. The loneliness, the pointlessness of the life in the almost eternal warmth, the breakfasts in drugstores, the recording of Bing Crosby singing Adeste Fideles in an abattoir for turtles, the terrible denial of age, ugliness, and death in an atmosphere where these are the more inescapable because they are so vehemently denied: all these Mr. Gold depicts with disquieting accuracy. And yet as autobiography these collected impressions of Miami Beach are even more disturbing: they suggest that Mr. Gold has left behind his own youth but has not found his new direction; he has wandered far, but has nowhere to go.

And yet it is impossible to despair about Mr. Gold himself. He has too much talent, too much juice - and too much humor. If he does not know how to achieve the inwardness that is the secret of a satisfying life, he is speaking for many besides himself. In the meantime he is going about his job with signal address. He has a fine knack for turning a phrase: "We need," he says, "more civil defense against the spirit of Civil Defense." Again: "The bachelor is a battery trying to charge itself." Again: "The hipster…is like a sick refrigerator, laboring with tremendous violence, noise and heat, and all for one purpose - to keep cool." And to an age oppressed by potted culture he exhilaratingly says: "We no longer have to keep up with the Joneses; we must keep up with Clifton Fadiman. He is watching you . . . The frontiersman could build a stockade against the Indians, but what home is safe from Gilbert Highet?" I say "exhilaratingly" because, so long as we have Herbert Golds around, we need have no fear of being entirely drowned in the waters of official patriotism and official culture, the cloying self-congratulation which is more lethal a flood than is generally acknowledged. He is an Ohioan of whom all Buckeyes can be proud, but whom some Buckeyes will wrongly regard as a crank.

Reviewer: Andrew Wright of Ohio State University. Professor Wright, who was born in Columbus, is the author of books on Jane Austen and Joyce Cary. At the time of the review, he had recently returned from England where, as the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he worked on a study of the novels of Henry Fielding.