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It
seems only natural that Gold would have
looked back in time to try to find the determining events
that propelled him into a writing career spanning more than
half a century. And it is equally natural that he would have
turned his
gaze to his childhood in Cleveland, where the influences of
what he calls “regular-folks America” began to shape
his perspective and propel him into the wider world in search
of all that was
new and different.
Born
in suburban Lakewood in 1924, Gold chafed at the social and
intellectual constraints imposed on a bright Jewish boy growing
up in a complacent and decidedly gentile part of town.
His forays into and around Depression-era Cleveland in search
of excitement and new experience were the classic wanderings
of the misplaced Bohemian, and the memories he accumulated
during those years would appear
in various forms again and again in his writing.
A
contemporary of the Beat-era poets and novelists, Gold traversed
much the same path as his fellow explorers. After World War
II, he attended Columbia University in New York, where he
got to know many of the writers who would give the generation
its name (including poet Allen Ginsberg, with whom he maintained
an on-again, off-again friendship for decades). As a Fulbright
fellow he attended the University of Paris, where he wrote
his first novel, Birth of a Hero, which was published
in 1951.
But
Gold differed from most of his contemporaries in two important
ways. Early on, he adopted a more consistent and professional
approach to his career (over the years he would publish more
than 20 novels, as well as innumerable short stories, essays,
memoirs, and magazine articles). And although he knew well
the coffee-house worlds of Greenwich Village and the Left
Bank-what he calls “the Bohemian archipelago”-he
was in but not of them. He never embraced the detached, ultra-cool
tone with which the Beats were so enamored, and his work always
seemed to be colored by the more profoundly human influences
of a childhood and adolescence spent in Cleveland. He has
lived in San Francisco's hip North Beach neighborhood since
the 1960s, but through it all he has remained essentially
a Midwestern boy.
In
his best novels and short stories, Gold infuses
a blend of humor, insight, and compassion into
his explorations of the human condition. Everything is fair
game-the lives of his family,
of characters met and imagined and, in particular, the progression
of his own journey through the world. He revels in follies-his
own and those of his creations on the page-but his true search
is for the words, the gestures, the moments that define and
reveal us. He writes in an emphatically American voice, as
befits an artist who first slipped into the storytelling mode
in the very middle of the American heartland.
text by
Mark Gottlieb
Fall
2002
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Noisy,
brawling, weeping or alcoholic fathers must, to some
extent, inoculate their children against the fearsome
separations wrought by excitement. My father usually
had things under control. He kept the lid on. I have
seen him drunk once. On a Christmas Eve it was; he stamped
into the house after the fruit store closed, wearing
his sheepskin coat, snowy and wet and laughing in a
way that frightened me. My mother kept trying to shush
him (babies sleeping) and crowd him into bed. He reeled
through the hall, and when his wild eye fell upon me,
it made no connection. He was roaring, but what about?
Nothing. Just roaring. Perhaps his Chassidic father
sometimes thus celebrated the God-given right to roar
like a beast. Perhaps he roared for the unforgettable
and the forgotten.
I
hid behind a door and put my nose in the crack. I watched
my father. If he pushed the door-less nose.
In
silence I watched him, and in a terror of loneliness.
To be present when a father laughs, and yet to be so
alone! My wet nose was in jeopardy against the crack
of the door. This was no Chassidic mystery. There was
no ritual to grasp at; it was his festival, his alone,
personal, excluding. He was thick and powerful in tufted
yellow sheepskin, and the crating hammer, with flat
silvery prongs, stuck out of his pants pocket. There
was also a bulge of holiday money-a good day's business.
He had come from the party he gave in the back room
for the Italians who worked in his store. Probably Myrna,
the bulging widow clerk, the heaviest thumb on any scale
in town, the tightest corset, had led to wildness. She
always wanted him to let go, push and shove, be a truck
driver with her. With her swollen lips and her hilarious
shrieks of laughter, she had everything figured out
in her own sweet way. A tangle of widow's desire. My
mother could settle that score later.
It
was Christmas Eve; this was America; all down the streets
of Lakewood, Ohio, children and parents put their lives
together in momentary communion. Only in our house did
the father celebrate without making his meaning clear.
Why
did this come to be my model of isolation, separation?
-Fathers
(New York: Random House, 1962)
I
heard there were Jews like me toward the east and, at
age seventeen, just out of high school, I set forth,
past Shaker Heights to Pittsburgh and New York, by hitchhiking
thumb, to work in restaurants for meals, sleep in odd
places, find redeeming adventure. I spent a wanderyear
traveling, sending postcards to my parents.
My
father came to America from Russia and lived in a basement
on the Lower East Side. I came to America from Lakewood
to live in a basement on the Lower East Side. I washed
dishes, cleaned rooms, waited on tables, and tried to
learn a little Yiddish. In 1942 there was still an immigrant
society in those streets, men who looked and smelled
like my father. I traveled in a dazed adolescent crisis,
suddenly finding sex and Jews everywhere in the land
of plenty. There were Jewish shoeshine men and Jewish
whores and Jewish cops. I was a Jewish kid with hands
smelling persistently of grease and strong soap.
I slept in the kitchen of a Rumanian restaurant on Hester
Street. I learned to drink coffee and smoke cigarets
[sic], my eyes gritty with longing, my mouth
rehearsing superior rejoinders, my heart reconstructing
my tragic past (Lucille, Susan, Lakewood, the unendurable
Midwest indefinitely prolonged). When the winter got
too cold, and my hands were peeling and swollen, I hitchhiked
southward. In Philadelphia I was picked up by a drunken
Buick dealer who was escaping his wife and children,
escaping his life, and he needed someone to drive so
he could drink and talk and forget. Now I was a Jewish
chauffeur. I was also a seventeen-year-old Jewish psychiatrist.
-My
Last Two Thousand Years (New York: Random House,
1970)
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