In his old age, Gold finds all that glitters

If America had the literary culture it ought to have, every city would have a writer like Herbert Gold.

They would be rooted rather than regional. Their sensibility would be cosmopolitan rather than provincial, though their focus would be voluntarily parochial -- not out of any limitation in taste or talent, but because they intuitively grasped the wisdom of Patrick Kavanagh’s shrewd insight that Homer made “The Iliad” from “a local row.”

They would, in other words, be capaciously minded authors with a sense of place.

Gold, 84, belongs irrevocably to San Francisco, where he has lived in a railroad flat on Russian Hill for nearly half a century, though he also has written movingly and knowingly of Cleveland, where he grew up; of Paris (where he spent critically formative years); and of Haiti, the other land of his heart’s desire. “Still Alive! A Temporary Condition” is the story of all that and how it came about -- part memoir, part meditation on love, aging and the writer’s life and altogether exhilarating reading.

At this point, Gold’s bibliography includes 18 novels -- most memorably, “Fathers” and “A Girl of Forty” -- dozens of short stories, essays, criticism and a great deal of first-rate newspaper and magazine journalism. (In the interests of the now fashionable full disclosure, it must be intrusively noted that some of the latter was done for this reviewer, when, in a previous incarnation, he edited The Times’ Opinion section. A mutual friend -- Allen Ginsberg -- first brought Gold’s work to my attention. Subsequently, he became a frequent Opinion contributor; we shared meals and memorable conversation here in Los Angeles and at the old Washington Square Bar and Grill in North Beach.)

“Still Alive” ranges in fascinatingly discursive fashion across Gold’s long career, his two marriages, his five children and an array of literary friends and comrades from Ginsberg to Saul Bellow. In terms of formal structure, this may be one of the loosest of his books, which somehow adds to the reader’s pleasure. There’s a certain lyric facility that comes to some writers in fortunate old age -- Hemingway had it in “A Moveable Feast” and didn’t know it -- and Gold clearly revels in it here. His, though, is a lyricism spiked with aphoristic insight that reminds us he did philosophy at Columbia and the Sorbonne:

“Every grief is unique. Life doesn’t necessarily make us better; that’s not life’s business. Life gives what it gives, takes back what it takes back, and it’s our business to sort things out for ourselves as best we can.”

Or:

“My eldest daughter tells me she doesn’t like my living alone. I’m not alone! But much of my company is now invisible because it’s only remembered.”

Or:

“Facetiousness is a poor but serviceable substitute for humor.”

Or:

“Some marriages are best forgotten but unforgettable.”

Or:

“Like Polonius, I try to pass on to my children some scrappy knowledge I think I’ve accumulated; the blessing of their existence is a wisdom they pass on to me.”

Or:

“Youth may be wasted on the young, but agedness is also wasted on the old, who are often too preoccupied lining up their time-release pills to relax and really enjoy their diminishment.”

Born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in Cleveland, Gold trained as a Russian interpreter and paratrooper during World War II but never saw combat. He studied English and philosophy at Columbia, where he frequented the bohemian circle -- Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lucian Carr, Herbert Huncke et al. -- who later would be deemed founders of the Beat Generation. Gold didn’t care for Kerouac, but he and Ginsberg became lifelong friends, though Gold’s aesthetic always was -- in the best sense -- too traditional to be drawn into the Ginsberg/Kerouac notion of a spontaneous Bop prosody. As undergraduates, Ginsberg and Gold shared a school prize for poetry. A Fulbright Exchange Scholarship and the GI Bill sent Gold to Paris, where he wrote his first novel, “Birth of a Hero,” and made one of his most enduring literary friendships with Bellow, then the kingpin of the American expatriate literary scene.

Indeed, one of the unexpected pleasures of “Still Alive!” is Gold’s extended portrait of Bellow. Though it’s a relatively brief chapter in length, it’s one of the finest sketches of the Nobel laureate you’ll find anywhere. Here, a first impression gleaned from their budding friendship in Paris:

“Bellow was not a stony challenger; rather, an amiable deity for the fresh crop of American would-be’s seeking out the Paris of Henry Miller. Saul’s generosity was not the sum of his appeal. His complaints, particularly marital, and his neediness, which went back to childhood or perhaps to the origins of the human species, gave him the charm of a genius of grief. His lamentations, which I thought of as ‘The Book of Saul,’ a long-running drama, had some of the eloquence of Job and Jeremiah; sackcloth, ashes, a wife who didn’t understand him, and sometimes, even worse, a woman who did. . . .

“Saul’s prose style married classical elegance to Mark Twain and the pungency of street speech; Yiddish played stickball with Henry James. . . .

“In the early fifties, Saul’s urban wit and angst -- Kafka-out-of-Chicago, Dostoevsky-from-the-yeshiva, polymathematical, polylinguistical, playful about it all -- offered just the ticket for a G.I. Bill generation which was heading from college into graduate work, although its parents had often not finished high school. He made fun of suffering, he made the suffering into fun, he was fully implicated in life.”

The same thing can be said of Gold, which is why, encountering Bellow in those bleak last years, he writes: “It made me fear my own old age to look into those great dark eyes and see the laughter in retreat.”

Off the evidence of this moving and edifying meditation/memoir, it’s fairly certain that nothing similar ever will be said of Gold, who seems to sum up something essential about his life and work, when he notes:

“Lovers, when in love, have happy eyes.”

And when they happen to be writers, they use those eyes to construct a prose rich in wise wonder, which “Still Alive!” most certainly is.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com