Ohioana Library Authors: Herbert Gold

Herbert Gold - Belief and Craft
An essay by Larry Smith

Originally published in the Winter 1978 Ohioana Quarterly

Herbert Gold claims good humoredly to have been described as a hyphenated writer - "a Cleveland writer, a Jewish writer, a New York writer, an expatriate writer, a San Francisco writer, a beat/hip writer, a young writer, a middle-aged writer, a sometimes-married writer, a contributor-to-quarterlies writer . . . ." He is more accurately depicted as a writer who writes, prolifically, with energy and penetrating insight. Often he is also an Ohio writer, not because he was born in Lakewood, Ohio, but because he frequently writes about, and through the perspective of, his Ohio youth.

Since his first novel, Birth of a Hero, appeared in 1951, he has been called "a writer to watch," the tenuous titles of "great" or "major" being held in critical reserve. It is time to recognize and appreciate Herbert Gold's major contribution of twenty-five years as a journalist, short-story writer, novelist, editor, and autobiographer. If Gold is still to be watched, it is because he has remained so active and alive to contemporary life. He has written incisive essays, brilliant story collections, and solid novels, and in each decade has produced a work that in truth is great - in 1955 The Man Who Was Not With It, a vivid first-person portrayal of hip carnival life; in 1967 Fathers, a powerfully human novel of the American Jewish family; and in 1972 My Last Two Thousand Years, his personal, unifying memoirs. In these books Gold has proven himself a major American talent.

Gold's critics have sought to reveal his talent by referring to Graham Greene, the oral style of Jack Kerouac, "Henry Miller without the sexual posturing," Sherwood Anderson, "a Whitman hipster combined with Jewish immigrant," a social recorder and deliberate stylist comparable to Gustave Flaubert, and a John Donne of Cleveland, Ohio. While analogies are often more interesting than revealing. I would describe Gold as having Saul Bellow's sincerity and skill without his heavy intentions, and as lacking the Yiddish cuteness of Bernard Malamud, but with his humor and heart. He is a chronicler of America's life styles and motivations on a par with John Updike as a contemporary stylist and moralist.

In form Gold is conventional and traditional, favoring the energetic and self-revealing style of colloquial first-person narratives. His chief experimentation is with content and style. A practitioner of both journalism and fiction, Gold sees a thin line separating their material and treatment. "The line between parajournalism and fiction is dissolving . . . I think there will always be distinction between an imaginative reconstruction of experience and an imaginative projection of vivid experience. The second is still going to be called journalism and the first still called a novel or a story. But the line separating them is blurred." It is no surprise then that Gold is adept at combining them, producing Fathers: A Novel in Form of a Memoir and the later novelistic memoirs of My Last Two Thousand Years. Perhaps he is merely aware of what novelist John Irving claims, "Facts may be strange, but rarely are they truer than in fiction." Truth is the goal of any artist, and he must not respect conventions or statistical views of the world. Gold explains in Fathers, "This is an imaginary history. And real. And twice imaginary." He is an explorer of the imaginative reality that holds and reveals us all. He follows intuitions in his creative revelation. "The novel is like drowning, it's very exciting. A novel can be anything. At its best, it integrates a view of life - what philosophy is supposed to do." Gold thus lays out the ground and goals of his work.

As a stylist Gold is both a skillful artist and a classic and compelling storyteller. "I like to think of storytelling as an oral art. I am telling a story to people on the other side of the fire," and that is Gold's most comfortable position - intimate and animated with his material. Early linked with the oral style of Jack Kerouac's beat prose, Gold has proven himself to be more versatile and entertaining as he achieves a kind of method-prose acting, becoming and revealing his narrators at the same time. At its best his style is full of warmth and intelligent humor; it has been described as "taut, keyed-up, nervously inventive," as "perfectly matched to our modern urbanized consciousness," as "very, very funny; or expensive; or even brilliant in little flashes," as "indifferent to risk," and ultimately, by James Dickey, as full of "delirious effectiveness." At its very worst it can be accused of a too self-conscious artistry and at times a moralistic obtrusiveness. But always Gold is able to charm and delight the reader with insights he didn't know he knew.

His earlier works were in poetry which he continues to write but refuses to publish. One feels this poetic bent, however, in his prose where he compels the reader into the active art of language making. Admitting that he early learned to make his own language from the spirit and habit of Yiddish in his family, Gold also describes his writing as tuned to intuition and craft, "I like to play with words. Sometimes, when I'm chopping away at a typewriter, I feel as if I am a sculptor and the words are the stone and the typewriter is the awl, and the eraser is the knife. It's a sculptural medium and the words have weight and texture." This skill can be felt in anything he writes from a report on the Olympics for Saturday Review to his most pungent and provoking passage of fiction. David Boroff identifies the achievement of Gold's style when he says that "Gold, like very few of our major writers, has tried to stretch language to meet the requirements of our time . . . to encompass new states of mind that writers in an easier time did not have to cope with." It is both a natural and a deliberate act that produces his writing.

At times criticized, like the comparable Updike, for the absence of a major thematic platform in his writing, Gold has his deepest themes embedded in the creative act of recording and assimilating life. "I'd like to document what life is really like. And what life is really like is not merely what I see around me, but the way I feel about it, and react to it." Gold's philosophy is inherent in his reason for writing, as Gold explains his own basic motivation, "to master my experience . . . I write also to entertain myself and to make things I know mysterious again and to make the mysterious things manageable…It is just the way I know the world." If he writes perhaps too much for some critics and it too commercial for others (going from the literary quarterlies and Nation to the slick Playboy and Esquire), these seem to be embarrassments merely within the critical realm. Gold is too busy writing to seek scholarly acceptance. As Granville Hicks asserted over a decade ago, Herbert Gold is "a central figure in today's literature." He is that because he does not hold back, because he can at times sail us all into new freedoms and awarenesses. "Not just in the open air . . . ." For such trips, and there are many, when Gold's writing and world are truly "with it and of it" we should all be grateful. Gold's answer to the critics of his prolific writing deserves note, "I would say about my own writing that it isn't always good, but the act of writing generally produced the best of what I've done, I stand by that. The prejudice against writing a lot is like saying making love is too important to do it all the time - you should only make love four or five times in your lifetime and make sure it's terrific. It doesn't work that way."

And what of the world Herbert Gold presents us with? Novelist Stanley Elkin asserts, "Stories are logical, the world isn't." The stories of Herbert Gold all move with the inner logic of Gold himself. While he may fail at times to project full-bodied characters for his ideas, it is a necessary fault if he is to lead us through his more spirited and essential struggle with life. His novels present characters caught in a projection of his own bouts with life. They bleed and sweat and talk and laugh and love for him; usually they talk and breathe the author's most fought-over ideas. At the heart of what it is like to be alive in America today, Gold's work has as its subjects and themes "power, money, sex, and love, intention in America." His main characters reflect the struggle of consciousness and conscience from the revealing extremes of American life - middle-aged lawyers questing love and self, the old-young hip carnie crowd, immigrants and racists, gangsters and depression adolescents, soldiers and junior executives, Village and San Francisco street people, graduate students, prostitutes, a sociology professor, and finally himself as writer and man in My Last Two Thousand Years.

Using conventional novel and story form with an idiomatic and expressive style, Gold seeks to reveal the new life that he reads on the street each day. Though he can swagger and strut at times, his writing is never verbose and is always warmed with wit and human insight. If he lacks a moral platform, he presents the more vital search for one. "Who am I?" and "Is America enough?" are two of his recurring and connected themes. Fellow San Franciscan Lawrence Ferlinghetti parallels Gold's basic approach in the title of his own recent work, Who Are We Now?. In this constant reappraisal of American life, Gold's most recent theme has been that of tribal identity - asserting his late-born Jewish identity in Fathers and My Last Two Thousand Years - and this may have been his tune all along. He is a writer, like Faulkner and Updike, whose individual achievements are enhanced by an overview of his masterwork.

Birth of a Hero (Viking, 1951) was Gold's first novel, written in his twenties using what Harvey Sandos terms "benevolent wit, radical perception, and intellectual vigor" to treat the love and self-quest of a middle-aged lawyer. Gold's hindsight as expressed in his memoirs, however, is that this book "creaked and groaned with flexings and intentions," and who would argue with him. It was, nevertheless, a touching portrayal that brought compassion and depth to the fictional treatment of the middle class. Gold jokingly recalls in his memoirs returning home from Paris, where the novel had been written, to find his face not inscribed on the postage stamp and his statue not appearing in Cleveland's Public Square.

This book was followed by The Prospect Before Us, a novel about Cleveland, where it was written and published in 1954. The novel's weaknesses are its label characters and "scenes strung together necklace-style," as one critic comments. It is a book of city life and black-white radical conflict. The narration by a hotel proprietor as he looks out on Prospect Street does reflect Gold's remarkably good ear and eye for life.

His first major work appeared the next year in his free-wheeling picture of American small-town carnival life, The Man Who Was Not With It (Little, Brown, 1955). The book is a picaresque novel, akin to Jack Kerouac's acclaimed On the Road which appeared that same year. It is at once tender and tough in its existential experience of life, questioning both the "engaged" and the detached "cool" stance. The book's narration by Pittsburgh youth Bud Williams creates its own carnival as he works to get loose from "the stiff-limbed gestures of the suburbs" and take the hazardous but necessary road journey to self. Treating the lives of Bud, the fortune teller Phyllis, her budding daughter Joy, and the brawling barker and truth-sayer Grack, the book leads us into society's telling extremes of drug addiction, perversion, love-hate relationships, freaks, and street philosophers on the caravan of social misfits. In his ambivalence, energy, and brutal will the narrator tells a tale that turns in fits of thought and bouts of emotion like a drugged fighter taking punches on his way to the floor. Reality is as apparent and evasive as our strongest daydreams and our most vivid nightmares. It is a long and uneasy journey into a hostile existence where Gold seems to be saying that all we have is ourselves and each other. This passage reveals the expressive toughness of the language as Bud mind-talks in a hip stream-of-consciousness:

The truth about my life - I fear all but facts - was this lie which I tell you. We who live waiting for decisions to be made by others have already lost our parents, mother, father, of someone to love. Self-made, crediting only our dismay, we will end unless we learn in bondage to the fat black wart on Grack's nose or the abstract glitter of his too-much-looking eyes. The carnie is thought to be a rough-and-tumble fellow or a tendoned dancer. We are neither. We are fatherless; we are motherless. Our fond hands touch the paddled boddle for love and leap like minnows to the mark's defeated bawl.

In this compound of styles Gold authentically presents the conflict of beat-hipster with his past, present, and future. Like Marlon Brando in his Waterfront portrayal, Gold was too closely identified with his hero, a role he could project but not embrace. This novel is a major achievement in its kinetic and engaging style and a striking record of a time and stance in American life.

The Optimist (Little, Brown, 1957) and Therefore Be Bold (Dial, 1960) each treat the conflict of forces in America, but lack developed characterization and rich narration. The latter book, however, provides an interesting and vibrant picture of adolescence during the 1930s depression period. They were followed by the more successful Salt (Dial, 1963) treating the more contemporary lifestyles of the Madison Avenue crowd. Two army buddies returned home, now conflict over a small-town girl in New York. Dan, the sad-sack hero from Cleveland, and Peter, the suave and pretentious Wall Street junior executive, are projected against a background of Village hipsters, suburban organization men, and the free-loving women that surround them. Though the novel achieved popularity, one critic dubbed it "a western of the Playboy world." Yet the book's essential conflicts are real - love or greed, hip or moral.

Then in 1967 came Gold's most compelling and successful novel, Fathers, treating the migration to America of a Ukrainian father and his American son's struggle to understand the place of his past. It is a book as skillful and rich as Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. (Later in this article we consider it further, with its autobiographical sequel My Last Two Thousand Years.)

The Great American Jackpot (Random House, 1970) represents Gold's clear shift to West Coast horizons. Written in the hip black and white dialect of the 1960s, it draws on San Francisco and Berkeley settings for its depiction of a disaffected young sociology student who in quiet desperation robs a bank to enliven his life. In satiric and comic style the protagonist gains new sense of self through his ensuing difficulties.

Following the success and acclaim of his memoirs My Last Two Thousand Years (Random House, 1972), Gold has produced two more fictional looks at contemporary culture, Swiftie the Magician (McGraw Hill, 1974) and Waiting for Cordelia (Arbor House, 1977). In both, his sense of the bizarre and comic seems to dominate. In Cordelia the classic Gold first-person narrator is a languid and muttering sociology professor who takes on an intelligent and tough prostitute as his next excuse for research. The book suffers from theatrics and comic but flat characterizations; the accent is on entertaining social portraits.

To this list must be added Gold's several collections of quick and decisive essays and charming short stories: Love and Like (Dial, 1960), The Age of Happy Problems (Dial, 1962), and The Magic Will (Random House, 1971). In the essays and stories of The Magic Will Gold defines his own goal when he takes on the Whitmanesque challenge. "To fix and name forever the sense of the magic will of America is a task for a great philosopher-poet, if we ever produce one." His writing has not grown slack, but rather has taken on increased conviction and a sense of public morality. This is the larger field of his concern - -the American conscience and consciousness.

Gold's two most important works should be discussed together since they are of common mold and substance. Fathers: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir treats the story of the Ukrainian Jew who transplants himself to the American Midwest at the turn of the century, and Gold's memoirs, My Last Two Thousand Years, picks up the story in the second generation son who has spent his life working and writing his way back to his Jewish and family sense of community and self. Both works are full of the adult "passages" that must be gone through if there is to be personal growth. There is no separation between the relaxed yet authentic voice which narrates both books. Each has his concern, yet his warmth and wit at expressing life. Both are set in his familiar Lakewood and Cleveland home. Herbert Gold has come home in these two books to his own richest material and style; the memoir form is a natural. The immigrant experience is, after all, the American experience.

In Fathers we have a father who lives in the challenge of the present and a son who must deal with the shadows of the past. The father's story of wrestling himself away from a domineering father in the Ukraine to arrive in the golden city of Canton, Ohio is sketched in. The father and his brother begin a vegetable-cart business there. He attempts to leave the small-town racketeers behind by venturing to Indianapolis, but returns to claim a wife and a store in Cleveland's West Side. The narrator comments, "A man threads his way through the hills and valleys with feeling, with hope, and with an alert sense of the possible." The father has lived the experience, the son is able to give it mythic meaning. Gold thus moves the narrator backward and forward in time, coming up to present awarenesses and then plunging back into the past again like a diver bringing up pearls. We move through Cleveland's Flats to the magnificently wrought scene where his mother, pregnant with him, almost drives the car into the Cuyahoga River. His father arrives and in a superbly absurd and male gesture tips it in as the wife look on. There are the Sunday mornings spent in the baths and the jubilant and cunning dealing at the West Side Market, a landmark still. There is a quietly real scene where the family is camped out at a Cedar Point cottage on Lake Erie battling the insects as World War II arrives in the Plain Dealer news.

Gold is using some early material from short stories in this work, including his particularly powerful "The Heart of the Artichoke" which goes back to the early 1950s. He has revealed how he actually wrote Fathers in a few weeks, "however, parts of that book were written seventeen years before the book was finally finished." He is able to release in this novel the story that has been writing itself in his subconscious for two decades. There are comic scenes from the grocery business that will be forever moving, and touching scenes in the family struggle with bigotry and with each other that are unbeatable in contemporary prose. The saga closes as the son, who expected to teach his papa at least something about life, finds himself revealed in the father. "Gradually my father's life echoes in mine; his shadow lies athwart mine." Accepting and learning from the father's life teaches the son that "he sought his own way to the common end, carving his will out of the dreadful void, and may I and other fathers do as much." The strength found in this experience and the telling of it are regenerative and, in part, account for the book's lasting popularity and acclaim. vIt is in My Last Two Thousand Years that Gold has the most to say about his Ohio roots. A brief plot summary provides a biographical sketch of the author. Gold's Jewish adolescence is spent in suburban Lakewood where his sensitivity clashes with his insensitive surroundings in such incidents as the symbolic infatuation with a snobbish and anti-Semitic girlfriend. Defying his mother's wish for him to be a good Jewish boy and become a doctor, he studies, instead, philosophy at Columbia and plays at being a Village intellectual while writing poetry; after an unheroic stint in the military, he returns to Cleveland and marries a nice Jewish girl from Detroit. After clashing with the bohemian scene in New York, the couple goes to Paris on a Fulbright. In the artistic climate there he flexes his intellectual muscles and is able to write his first novel. He returns home to Cleveland to be met by no mass celebration. Here he produces a novel, teaches at Western Reserve, and takes a brief fellowship at Haiti. His return to a teaching position in Detroit is followed by a hard divorce. Back in New York he is at loose ends, though he achieves writing success without personal fulfillment. In Israel by chance on its tenth anniversary of independence, he is drawn into an experience of his own Jewishness and moves toward a reintegration of self through an acceptance of his family and life. A marriage and two additional children follow as we end with the symbolic birth of the children and the man.

In My Last Two Thousand Years Gold again achieves a balance of idea and life where thought, feeling, intuition, and sensory detail combine to produce revelation. His gentle retelling of his own troubled life provides the full-bodied framework for his realizations of self as writer, Jew, father, son and lover. They are realizations worth savoring for the very hard-fought and authentic nature of Gold's struggle, "By a wide and narrow road I fought my way back to an allegiance I didn't possess." Gold's life is full of this sense of hard refusal to accept the too easy definitions of self imposed by others. He struggles with both his Jewish and Ohio roots as a person and writer. In both cases the soil is not rich or deep enough, and many transplants are necessary before growth is achieved on his native soil--his own migration from and to self, his humanity. The difficulty of the quest has not forbidden, but only deepened the sense of life one shares with him.

Though he lives now in San Francisco, he is aware of his Ohio roots as he confesses in personal correspondence - though he feels the aging of his family in Cleveland, he also acclaims, "When I take the Rapid from the airport out east, it's still tremendously dramatic vista, changing rapidly, and I know it must be interesting if this cat had an extra life to live." His memoirs are full of the recurring struggle of how to survive as a Midwestern and more particularly an Ohio writer. He addresses the problem directly in this book. Like most of the great Ohio writers from William Dean Howells to Sherwood Anderson to Hart Crane, Kenneth Patchen, and James Wright, he has had to leave Ohio to find it and write about himself. The tribal identity which he comes to accept as a Lakewood, Ohio Jew reflects both his Jewish and Ohio sense of self. Whether he is nostalgically recalling his adolescence - "I learned to drink coffee and smoke cigarets, my eyes gritty with longing, my mouth rehearsing superior rejoinders, my heart reconstructing my tragic past (Lucille, Susan, Lakewood, the unendurable midwest indefinitely prolonged)" - or recalling the early post-war days of his career as a Western Reserve teacher, first-published novelist, Cleveland hotel night-clerk, and frequenter of the city's jazz clubs, foreign films, and Arcade bookshops, Gold is tied to these gnarled and exposed roots. He clarifies here, "The emptiness of history in Lakewood did not give shape to my longings, but it provided needs which made me move and released my energies." Gold's realizations of the plight of an Ohio writer - having an inattentive audience and a lack of artistic community - are tempered by his healthy recognition of the die that has been cast. His hard-earned acceptance of self is a new source of strength in his work. He is like storyteller Sherwood Anderson of small-town Clyde and poet James Wright of industrial Martins Ferry in that all three use the Ohio setting as a rich background for the life and themes they project. Ohio becomes a kind of mythic symbol of simple if confused values and an archetypal sense of place where people's lives are written on their faces. A world once rejected, it is nevertheless a world forever their own.

Gold can be expressing both his Ohio and his Jewish roots when he explains near the book's close: "The writer fits into the Jew who fits into the writer, who fits into the Jew. The interpretation is continuous." The book is a dramatization of Gold as a person progressively achieving his humanity. And whether or not we share his Midwestern, Jewish, or male identity, his humanity is our own. He has, as he always intended and as only the truly great Ohio writers have, projected this Ohio past into the world's present and future. It becomes the hard and real microcosm that forces a true entrance into the world. When Gold does this with his life, he does it for us all. "Fact and ideal, history and dream, disappointment and hope, there are no ways to reconcile them but through belief and craft." Gold's realizations are the essential expression of his life's work.

The chief sense of tribal community of My Last Two Thousand Years is with his Jewishness; however, it should be clarified that he does not settle for "Jewish Unitarianism . . . Chicken-soup Judaism, B'Nai B'rith and the Israel Bond Judaism, country-club Judaism . . . " but for the larger "responsibility to history, ancestors alive in oneself, a tribal identity with hope, joy, suffering . . . a recognition of possibility is the beginning of possibility." While his roots and his particular path need not be our own, his way is a cosmic yet life-bound projection that unites us all.

"But if there were something truer than history! How sweet it would be. The heart and the will seek to make something more, something that extends further than time, that weighs more than fate." Herbert Gold is one of the important writers today working to make life not only endurable but beautiful. It is through his lasting faith in man and his talent to record life with vivid astuteness that Gold becomes the modern mythmaker who both penetrates and deepens the mystery of existence.

Author Larry R. Smith has been Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at the Firelands Campus of Bowling Green State University since 1970. Before taking his graduate work at Kent State University he taught school for three years in the Cleveland suburb of Euclid. His poetry has appeared in the little magazines and in his book Growth: Poems and Sketches. His critical study of poet Kenneth Patchen, in Twayne Publishers' United States Authors Series, was published last spring.