Herbert Gold's Golden State
Interview by Jeff Troiano

photo by Gene Anthony

Jeff Troiano: Your first novel, Birth of a Hero, was published fifty-one years ago. What do you remember most about that experience?
Herbert Gold: I was just a kid, so it was a fantastic experience. I was a graduate student in Paris, and I submitted my manuscript through the mail. I didn't have an agent, and it was plucked out of the slush pile at Viking Press. The best part about it was that it enabled me to proclaim, "I am a writer," but now I get a little nauseated when I try to read it. It was after Birth of a Hero that I started to write what I really wanted to write.

Who else was Viking publishing in those days?
Saul Bellow was the inspiration for me to send it to Viking. They also published Graham Green and John Steinbeck.

What new influences began to affect your style?
I was young. I felt free and confident, so I did what I wanted to do. Viking wanted me to do what I had done with Birth of a Hero, but I went in a completely different direction with the next book, Therefore Be Bold—so naturally Viking rejected it. Some years later, after publishing several other books, I published Therefore Be Bold. Dial Press, my publisher at the time, asked, "Have you got a book for us this year?" I said, "Well, I have this old manuscript. Would you like to see it?" It was ultimately published in several languages, and translated twice into German.

Which of your works in particular won over the critics?
Birth of a Hero defined me as a promising young writer. My picture appeared in the women's magazines, looking cadaverous and poetic. But I think my third novel, The Man Who Was Not With It, received favorable reviews and critical acclaim, even from academia.

Critics often pinpoint Fathers as your key work, the one that launched you as literary success.
Fathers had great appeal. It was a best seller. It was selected by a big book club; it was translated all over the world; I was on television, and my picture was in magazines.

Why do you think that Fathers appealed more than the others?
You never know exactly. I asked my editor at the time, "What happens? What makes a book a best seller?" He said it's a matter of telling people something they want to know. Fathers is a novel about the Jewish family, about my father coming to America. I guess it was fairly early in the interest in ethnic experience in America. A lot of the readers were Jews, of course, but I also received many favorable notes from Slavs and Italians. The letters would say, "You're describing my experience," even though they came from another ethnic background. Another reason possibly is, it's basically a true story. I think that appeals to readers.

You're an Ohioan and a Jew, and your roots came through visibly in your early works. Would you say that those themes still appear in your writing?
One theme I see in my work, to the extent that I understand my work, is that of the difficulty of marriage, which reflects my experience to some extent. I've been married twice. Also, the theme of being an outsider is prevalent, because in many ways I was an outsider while growing up in Lakewood, Ohio, a small town outside of Cleveland.

In which regard?
We were just about the only Jewish family in Lakewood at that time. It was a very difficult time for Jews in America. There was a lot of prejudice. My parents were somewhat outsiders. Although my mother wasn't born here, she went to high school in the United States. And though she was quite American, she had a slight accent. My father, who owned a store then, had a distinct accent. The other fathers carried briefcases and wore white shirts and ties to work, but my father was a working man with a store. You know, I think everybody in his own heart is an outsider, because in our heart of hearts we're all alone. It's difficult to say why I write about that. You deal with it whichever way you can. Some people deal with it by drinking; some people deal with it by trying to make a lot of money; and others deal with it by writing.

You've mentioned that love plays an important role in your writing. You are often careful to point out that "fiction is fiction." But do your friends and family ever take you to task about some of your fictitious characterizations?
I've written about the problems of marriage and divorce, and I've been married and divorced. It always irritates me when people assume that a book is directly autobiographical. Of course there's an autobiographical element, but it's still fiction.

Can you identify a basic motivation for your writing?
Writing is the way I master the world; it's my way of controlling things. If I can't write, I feel I lose control of my life. I need to make sense of the world, to make the world magic. Someone once said, "Life must be a festival." I really want to make life a festival. One of the ways I do that is by describing life as I see it, maybe with some humor. I want life to be funny—or at least interesting.

Would you say that you write solely to please yourself?
I would think not. You don't write just for yourself, because you want to communicate. It's an act of sharing with others, and you want to imagine the best possible communication. That's how a story is different from a dream; a dream is just for you. A story is for others; it's something to share.

Have you altered your approach to writing?
I'm more direct now than I used to be. I used to play with language more, but I don't do that as much now. Maybe it's that I've stored up so much experience that word—play just gets in the way. I'm more interested in telling the truth about experience than I am in amusing readers with plays on words.

You've been described as being extremely prolific. Would you say you're as prolific as ever?
I describe myself as "a blocked writer"; I deal with the blockage by writing a lot, although I don't write as much as I used to. It's a drift from being poetically inclined to being philosophically inclined. I look for the meaning of a story before I start it. In the past, I would just want to write a story quickly. I enjoyed writing like that.

Do you find that you rewrite more now or did you rewrite more then?
I always rewrote, and I still rewrite. I rewrite until I'm nauseous. If I look at the page and I want to throw up, then I realize it's done.

How long have you been in San Francisco?
Forty-two years. Actually, I was here before that while in the Army, when I came to San Francisco to write an article. I also came here to visit Allen Ginsberg in 1957, which was kind of the peak of the Beat period.

How did you first meet Allen Ginsberg? What did you think of Jack Kerouac's work?
We met while we were in college at Columbia. We became rather good friends, although we disagreed violently about a few things. One, he was proselytizing for homosexuality and I was straight. We'd sit at the West End bar near campus, and he'd say things like, "How do you know if you don't try it?" Then I'd say, "I know I don't want to know." We went back and forth about that. We also disagreed about Jack Kerouac. I was not enthusiastic about Kerouac, and Allen was basically in love with him. I was very tough on On The Road in a review I wrote of the book for The Nation. I'd probably be gentler now, but back then I simply resented Kerouac's personality, his style, his drunken rambling, and his pushing. For a while I was loosely aligned with the Beat writers, but that just wasn't my style. Later I actually felt sorry for Kerouac. He went downhill really fast. I reviewed Big Sur, one of his later books, very favorably, because it dealt in the sadness of being worn out. And he was definitely worn out; Kerouac died before he was fifty.

Did the Beat energy of San Francisco affect your writing?
I was definitely turned on by the energy. There were writers I liked here, like Michael McClure. He was a charmer who still lives in the Bay Area; Allen Ginsberg was here quite often, hanging out with other Beat poets; Richard Brautigan was a friend of mine as well, until he got too drunk and too paranoid to be anybody's friend. It was fun to see him at his place in the early years. I remember he had a rusty Coke bottle top in a big frame on his wall. He had given it the title "The Oldest Living Coke Bottle Top." He used to call himself "The Gestetner Rabbi" because he used to stand on street corners giving people his poems that he'd reproduced by the Gestetner system, which was a form of mimeograph. I remember walking with Allen down an alley in Chinatown, and he said, "Listen to that sound." We realized it was the whirring of a mimeograph machine, which is how we made copies before Xerox. He said, "Some Beat poet is printing out his poetry."

It's obvious that the whole North Beach literary scene has changed tremendously. What's your assessment?
I'm afraid if City Lights weren't there, there wouldn't be much left. City Lights is still the philosophical center of a physically attractive neighborhood. When I first moved here, North Beach was the equivalent of Manhattan's West Village—today's equivalent would be the East Village in New York. It was pretty much a fringe area, like what the Mission was until the last few years. Today, if you were to look for a Beat-like scene in San Francisco, you wouldn't find it in North Beach. You'd go to Valencia Street in the Mission. You'd go to bookshops like Adobe Book Shop on 16th Street or Abandoned Planet Bookstore on Valencia.

Which was your first true San Francisco novel?
I'm going to answer this question indirectly. When I was living in Paris, I was inspired to write my first book, which was about Cleveland and Lakewood, Ohio. When I came to San Francisco, the first thing I worked on was a book about New York. Getting distance from the place really helped. I started doing some journalism about San Francisco quite early, but it took a while before it was appropriate, you might say, to write about San Francisco. Fathers is about Jews coming to America, to New York, to Cleveland, and to San Francisco. San Francisco seeped into my work gradually. The first novel that took place entirely in San Francisco might have been The Great American Jackpot, which is about the hippie experience.

You wrote an incredible non-fiction book entitled Bohemia: Digging the Roots of Cool in the early 1990s. When did you realize that a "Bohemia" existed?
I wanted to understand my country, you know, understand my land and the group of people with whom I felt most comfortable. I noticed that whenever I traveled, I always seemed to drift toward the Beat coffeehouses, the hippie bookstores, the natural food places—what we now call "Bohemia." Even as a child I hung out at a candy store where the odd people congregated. The people I describe in the book are like that, true Bohemians. They're outcasts, self-removed, doing different things than other people. They don't worry about money. They're not worried about material displays. They have another sense of the way things should be.

Any words of wisdom for someone who might like to follow your path?
I always ask young writers, "Are you certain you want to be a writer? If you're absolutely sure, then do it." If you really want to write, writing has to take precedence over everything else, except for taking care of your loved ones. It has to be more important than any possession, more important than fame. We hear about just a few writers who get famous, but most of them don't. It's got to mean more than that.