Ginsberg, Kerouac and Herb Gold.
From the (local) San Francisco obituary notice in the Chronicle this week on novelist Herb Gold (1924-2023):
“When he (Gold) got out of the service, he returned to Columbia, this time on the GI Bill, and was an elder student in a literary scene that included both Ginsberg and Kerouac. They all hung out at the same dive bar near campus.
“I was very good friends with Allen Ginsberg,” he said. “I crossed the street to avoid Jack Kerouac. He was a bad drunk and a liar even then.””
and from the New York Times
“He returned to Columbia after World War II and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy. He struck up a life-long friendship with Allen Ginsberg there and nourished a cordial dislike for Jack Kerouac, who returned the favor, denouncing him to Ginsberg in a 1958 letter as “a nowhere nothing as a writer.”
His friendship may have had life-long duration, but it also had significant stresses.
Ginsberg writing to Kerouac – “Incidentally, if you can get a copy of American Mercury for April 1952, there’s a snotty story in it by Herb Gold about me called “The Widening Flaw” (like the widening gyre) which is more unpleasant than Holmes’s book. Such notoriety. Really about me too. I didn’t review that bastard’s book for Commentary half a year ago because I didn’t like it and didn’t want to bother saying anything unsympathetic or negative as matter of principle. Shows the difference in breed. He wrote me an apology, (I sent him a card saying the story stank and he was putting needles in my wax doll), saying he wrote it for money and also it really wasn’t about me, the stupid liar..”
As for Kerouac, here’s an excerpt from Gold’s 1957 imperious and condescending On The Road review (hardly a notice to engender any warmth):
“The hipster-writer is a perennial perverse bar mitzvah boy, proudly announcing Today I am a madman. Now give me the fountain pen. The frozen thugs gathered west of Sheridan Square or in the hopped-up cars do not bother with talk. That”s why they say man to everybody they can’t remember anybody’s name. But Ginsberg and Kerouac are frantic. They care too much, and they care aloud. I’m hungry, I’m starving, let’s eat right now! That they care mostly for themselves is a sign of adolescence, but at least they care for something, and it’s a beginning. The hipster is past caring..”
Kerouac’s full quote, goaded into anger (Allen counseled the futility of reply):
“Herbert Gold is a nowhere, nothing as a writer, why don’t he leave you and me alone, we have suffered in the Hell of Poetry, been busted, fucked up, lost, starved, ask him how much he’s suffered for his dinky little craft? I have a policy now (1958) of completely ignoring all Golds and such-like, they’re really dying for a rebuttal..”
and again, “Do guys like (Richard) Wilbur [another early Beat critic] and (Herb) Gold stay up nights hoping we’ll hurl critical attacks at them? Geez.”
Allen: “I saw the Gold piece, not the later Wilbur, and many others, got all worked up one day on T (pot) and almost wrote huge manifesto of nonsense but it’s all transitory and illusory aftereffects of writing and not writing itself, so decided to shut up.”
and some time later (writing from Paris) – “Herb Gold was here, as I wrote Peter (Orlovsky),
I was very paranoid about him, (Bill (Burroughs) thought too much so), but finally settled down, he came by often, dug Bill, I read him County Clerk, explained what I could about your actual method of writing, perhaps he be more sympathetic. First nite I screamed at him but then cooled it. He’s just another race or something, Depressing.”
Gold in the revealing 2017 profile by Jeff Weiss in The Washington Post
“We’d to go to bars near Columbia and Allen lectured me on Saint Teresa, whom he loved. Jack Kerouac, whom he loved…He’d always ask why I didn’t try homosexuality. How would I know if I didn’t like it?””
“Many Beat contemporaries”, Weiss reports, “attributed Gold’s dismissals to jealousy, but it stemmed more from fundamental divergences in style and thought. If most Beats slanted toward squinting mysticism, Gold was a sarcastic realist…”
A sarcastic realist? – Like Allen said, “another race”!
Gold in the Weiss piece gets one more dig in – ““Kerouac destroyed himself with alcohol by 47. Like James Dean, he looks great stenciled on T-shirts…Ginsberg inspired people to work, Kerouac inspired a speed-rap style that came out of taking speed. Although I have to admit now that the image he projected of camping out and cooking Jell-O over a fire could be appealing to a young person.”
“My eldest daughter, a psychologist, said, ‘Dad, it’s not good for you to hate.’ I said, ‘It’s very good for me to hate.’”
Sarcastic realism.
Gold lived a long life and with considerable achievement. May he rest in peace.
Bob Conant, co-owner of the legendary St Marks Bookshop in New York (where Allen and Philip Glass first connected) died this week. Another complex and often contradictory figure. Read his obituary (and an obituary for the bookshop) – here
Ross Goodwin‘s upcoming AI Ginsberg presentation, originally planned for this past Tuesday has been postponed but will be revealed to the world (at Unit London) shortly. More AI and Allen Ginsberg experimentation, (clearly plenty more AI experimentation!). Stay tuned!
Kalum Carter on Brian Graham’ s Robert Frank book (see our previous announcement – here of this intimate and engaging volume)
Material Wealth – more next week (I know we said that last week!) but, for the time being, we’ll leave you with David Wills’ rave review over at Beatdom – “visually stunning”, “a wonderful text”, “highly recommended”, “I can’t really say enough to do this book justice”, David writes.
