A Walk on the West Side: California on the Brink by Herbert Gold. Arbor House, 1981. 236pp. $4.95
Ohioana Quarterly Fall 1981

Herbert Gold, who started out in Cleveland, has traveled to far places, but none of them is stranger than the California (and by extension the America) he pictures in this book. The chapters range from a description of Los Angeles - "the first American experimental space colony on earth" - to a consideration of modern marriage, "No Goddamn Body Stays Married Any More" (Gold himself is twice divorced). There is the story of his twenty-year friendship with William Saroyan. There is a hilarious discussion as to whether the Golden Gate Foundation was really a bordello, as the police claimed, or whether the ladies who worked there were "performing a psycho-medical service," as they claimed. There are chapters ranging from an account of the way movies are made for TV to a sad description of "The Post-Hip Generation." The book ends with a chapter on "The Rise of the People People," those who say on every occasion "I'm a people person," employing the "fast-food forms of love," in which the "lovee is a convenience, an occasion for private bliss."

The quality and variety of these essays can be judged by the list of periodicals in which some of them originally appeared: Geo, The Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Times Book Review, Audience, Playboy, the Berkeley Monthly, Cosmopolitan, Playgirl, Oui, the Los Angeles Times, and Travel & Leisure. Gold is discerning, thoughtful, and clever. In describing our current aberrations, which are somewhat less curtained in California than elsewhere, he provides a collection that is amusing and horrifying. And he has a gift for the neat phrase; one constantly is tempted to read the book aloud to anyone within earshot. Recommended.

Travels in San Francisco by Herbert Gold. Arcade Publishing, 1990. 196pp illus $17.45
Ohioana Quarterly Summer 1990

Gold, a Clevelander, moved to San Francisco thirty years ago. He has seen it grow and pass from being the home of the "flower children" and the days of Haight Ashbury into a sophisticated city able to retain the identity of its neighborhoods. This is not a book for tourists interested in discovering a new experience. It is a leisurely look at some old landmarks and some new ones. You learn more about Herbert Gold than you do about San Francisco. He is, as are most San Franciscans, anti-smoking. He treasures the charm of the neighborhoods and, best of all, he remembers the way things were - sometimes wistfully, sometimes not. Anyone who loves San Francisco, as I do, will love this book. I hope Herbert Gold will take us on more travels.

Reviewer: Barbara Maslekoff

Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti by Herbert Gold. Prentice Hall Press, 1991. 303pp $19.95
Ohioana Quarterly Spring 1992

Herbert Gold first went to Haiti almost forty years ago. Today he regards it as a second home. With Haiti in the news almost daily, Gold's latest book provides us with a personal look at this island nation of contrast and paradox. We meet the people he has met there over the years - journalists, ministers, intellectuals, merchants, voodoo priests, a madam - and we understand Gold's love and infatuation. For him, "it is still the magic island." For the reader it is a look at a fascinating place, corrupt, generous, and passionate.

Bohemia by Herbert Gold. Simon & Schuster, 1993. 253pp $21.00
Ohioana Quarterly Fall 1993

When Herbert Gold described his hometown, Cleveland, as the "Paris of Northeastern Ohio" I knew at once that here was a writer of far-out farce and fantasy. Bohemia - where Art, Angst, Love and Strong Coffee meet - it says on the cover. Gold has covered a considerable area of the globe and wherever he wanders ultimately becomes Bohemia. It might be moot as to which is cause and which if effect.

"At age seventeen, fresh from Lakewood, Ohio (go to Cleveland and keep hiking westward), I thought New York City and Columbia College, fog-shrouded ramparts of the east, were just the places to bring me into contact with the great world of truth, beauty, poetry, and girls. I n high school I had taken to sending poems to a little magazine printed in New York on thick brown butcher paper. Amazingly, some of them were published. I announced my arrival; rough poet slouches into town from the Ohio frontier - neglecting to mention that I was a pimply goggle-eyed freshman. The cordial voice of the editor, whose voice reflected years of cigarettes and blackberry cordiality, invited me to a party of poets, nothing but poets, in his apartment downtown. He said to come early because there were so many poets eager to make contact with a leader of the Cleveland imagist scene."

It was there that he met Anais Nin, who softly murmured an invitation to join her on her houseboat in Hoboken: "The offer was so unreal it had to be real. Hoboken, houseboat, harbor, the salt and smell of the Atlantic, the Azores out there someplace beyond the Statue of Liberty, the history of lust and lyric poetry, all that was surely due a Rimbaud (only straight), a Byron (without a club foot or the noble breeding), a Hart Crane (also from Cleveland but not a suicide)."

"I was ready for whatever came next. We descended the long winding staircase toward Chinatown. And then, near the bottom of the stairwell, she spoke the fateful words which abruptly altered my fate. 'You remind me . . .' she whispered. 'Remind me . . . of my . . . remind me of my father' . . . . It was the most terrifying declaration she could have uttered. It was so out of touch with my own picture of her, of me, of what we were supposed to be heading for in Hoboken, on her houseboat . . . trellises . . . water lapping . . . instructional passion . . . that I simply pinwheeled into panic."

There ensued a boyish babble of excuses - neglected homework, paper due in the morning, the danger of being late and locked out of the dorm. "In my memory she still stands on the bottom rung of a long staircase on Mott Street, her tiny face under the hat, behind the veil, showing elegant Spanish incomprehension. Pale. Wondering. Hoboken-bound without company."

"It's fifty years now. Not long ago I looked in her published diaries to see if she had any comment on that evening of poetic interaction high above Mott Street." Apparently not.

There is undeniable truth in Herbert Gold's philosophy, "The more things change, the more they become different." It is infinitely more difficult, not to mention more costly what with rampant inflation, to be Bohemian nowadays. A quondam Bohemian who grew up in upper outer California remembers folk music, guitars, the acoustic meta-physical rapping of the Fifties. He remembers the protest, hope and heads filled with wild surmise of the Aquarian Sixties. There were little cafes, little bookstores and easy loafing in the mist of his boyhood. "Gone, all gone," he sighed, uttering a truth which can be uttered about so much.

What a reckless disregard for convention and convenience were to la vie boheme of Paris, trust funds and tax-free bonds are to Upper Bohemia today. Herbert Gold admits that life is not a cabaret, old chum, and more's the pity, but "Bohemia still exists for those who are possessed of the need to seize the day or plan the future or regret the past, all stubbornly devoted to demonstrating that life really is what good sense tells us it is not."

So what do we learn? Bohemia is not what it used to be - if it ever was.

Reviewer: Jane Horrocks