The Open Mouth: A Review of Good as Gold
Golub, Ellen
THE OPEN MOUTH A REVIEW ELLEN GOLUB Good as Gold by Joseph Heller; Simon and Schuster, New York, 1979; 447 pages. It is now ten years since Alexander Portnoy ended his obscene tirade against his...
...The two epigraphs to the book further clarify Gold's position as outsider: Lyndon Johnson's famous claim, "I've got his pecker in my pocket," and Bernard Malamud's quieter dictum, "If you ever forget you're a Jew, a gentile will remind you...
...I've got an important friend in Washington who tells me there's no more anti-Semitism left...
...He is a character about whom it is difficult to have feelings, about whom we can only laugh...
...She suggests "Mother...
...Only Jew I ever saw kneeling was a girl giving blow jobs in our fraternity house because that's the only way we'd let her in...
...for his paper (on Tristram Shandy) propounding innovative reasons for an enthralling admiration he had never been able to feel...
...Such are framed and hung by the President in his oval office...
...He can never become a part of the Washington scene because he, as an outsider, wants it so much...
...He picks up Gold's phrases and shoots them back, from the hip, in bureaucratic evasions...
...Only when Joseph Heller first published the first chapter of Catch 22, he captioned it "Catch 18," the catch of life, "chai," an essentially Jewish dilemma...
...It is now ten years since Alexander Portnoy ended his obscene tirade against his parents, the Jews, the gentiles, and that "sour grape of a religion" upon which he found himself sucking...
...The distance between is not meaning—merely unbridgeable, incalculable, irretrievable distance in time and in experience...
...Black," said Gold...
...It is a special kind of language that makes Heller's novel at once American and Jewish...
...There is, in this novel, not fear that life is paradoxical and hunger insatiable, but the knowledge that this is so...
...Gold plays an unwitting Henny Youngman in the Washington scene...
...You were smarter...
...Not ever sated, he fills his life, he overfills...
...To fend off feelings, to fill in the spot where feelings are absent: layers and layers of words...
...Bruce wonders, "How were you able to do that...
...In graduate school, Gold "had won high marks...
...You were doing my work for me, weren't you...
...He runs from middle age, the drudgeries of academic life, from orthodontia bills, and his vulgar, unappreciative Jewish family...
...But Gold, unlike Newsome, is a Jew...
...He has energy but no passion...
...This is obviously a gentile feat, but the even larger feat we come to know about Newsome is that he is as transparent as he is shallow...
...Students enrolling in Gold's classes find that the titles do not reflect the course content...
...Pray to God, said Nixon, and he prayed to God...
...AHRANGE...
...But instead of filling the gap between Gold and tne Washington insiders, his articulation widens it...
...An occasional one or two is still pirated by his gentile friend...
...Gold's senile, mad stepmother greets him always with the observation that he's got a screw loose...
...Tall...
...Family connections...
...They meet over platters of brisket and kugel, forks raised in rapturous contemplation of the edible...
...He collects women, becoming engaged to one without even being separated from the last, and not because he loves them but because they can do him social or professional good...
...And the ultimate test of loyalty, the one which finally causes him to leave Washington, is the discovery that Ralph Newsome is not his friend, that should another holocaust come, Ralph will not hide him...
...Black," said his father...
...His alienation from his family is complete, and absurdly noted in every dialogue with them...
...He wants, he wants, he wants, but he is not surprised that he does not get...
...She loved them so...
...Gold eroticizes the mouth, using it to tell us he is diaspora man in exile and in exile from exile...
...It is the paradoxical nature of his life, then, that Gold talks about, that Heller writes about...
...Banana...
...What is the Jewish experience in America...
...In seventies America, an age grown tired of protest, Joseph Heller also lights upon a representative American voice...
...Poor Mom had to come all the way to New York to taste a tangerine...
...He fills the vacuum with words...
...You aren't short," his sister tells him, "You're average...
...It is all he feels, all he is able to fill with his compulsive talking...
...Ah, so Gold would like to believe...
...Seems to me his God was Nixon...
...There were basins of fruit and bushels of washed, fresh vegetables, and smoking tureens of stews of hare and venison...
...Bruce Gold ambivalently courts and then flees these people as from the plague...
...PINE-EPPLE...
...Language, for him, is not the weapon it was for Portnoy...
...For what can he say, he who has had no Jewish education to speak of, he who has known only Jews in his lifetime...
...The same words, said first in English and repeated in a Yiddish dialect, force us to see the same fruit from two vastly different perspectives: plentitude and deprivation...
...Seeing the deprivation of our family as it reflects on us and our love for them is potentially so painful, so feeling, that it is perhaps best to distance with a mad paradoxical oxymoron, a hysterical comic fiction of alienation squared...
...Bruce Gold may work hard, running around to get in, to make enough, to be accepted...
...This paper Newsome had managed to steal and have published under his own name...
...To his wife...
...There is a constant flow of conversation pouring out of Gold's mouth, matched in its profusion only by the incredible quantities of delectables which flow in...
...Kissinger is the best example of the well-owned Jew...
...Everything Gold does now is boring, has no meaning or feeling of attachment...
...the written word fulfills Gold not half so much as the spoken, which engages his audience with lapel-grabbing, humor...
...To which Gold responds, "Average ain't good enough...
...But when he then calls her mother, she snaps at him, "I'm not your mother...
...The real war is the war with one's ambivalent, paradoxical desires...
...Not merely an outsider to Washington, he is an outsider in his own family...
...Tall...
...Portnoy's "geshrei" is for satiety, as he moves from passion to passion, from masturbation to Monkey, consumed by the belief that he can extricate himself...
...Glowing like a Christmas fire near the end of the table was a firkin or two, perhaps a whole kilderkin, of fresh, wild raspberries, each perfect as a ruby...
...For whatever Nixon was, and for however much he was despised by this country, it is Kissinger who is remembered by the characters in this book as "the one who got down on his knees with Nixon to pray to God on that rug...
...Gold bears no bitterness toward Newsome...
...He sits respectfully by, being insulted by a senile, self-confessed anti-Semite—his future father-in-law— as the old man addresses him as Goldberg, Goldstein, Goldenrod, Goldfinger, Nieman Marcus, Sammy, Kaminsky, Hymie, Manishevitz, and the like...
...Gold articulates in order not to feel...
...I think we're being accepted now, without any prejudice, and we're being assimilated...
...On a crested salver of silver embossed with the head of a pig was the eyeless head of a cooked pig...
...not because he enjoys sleeping with them—he is surprised, in fact, that such a tall beauty as his fiancee can be so unpleasurable in bed—but because he should...
...For Bruce Gold, the single passion is the mouth...
...The Jew's great hunger for assimilation is given voice in this novel concurrently with the knowledge that assimilation is never possible...
...White," said his father...
...Gold whistles in the dark...
...Other books that Gold considers writing, and that he has been saving newspaper clippings for, are about David Eisenhower and Henry Kissinger...
...he only talks about it at the many luncheons, dinners, and snacks that take place in the novel...
...all are likely to wind up reading Shakespeare's histories...
...Instead of the many articles he has prolifically spawned, he now attempts to write a book that will, once and for all, place him in the big league...
...He is enamoured of food—the book is crammed full of it: There was turkey, partridge, quail, squab, and goose to start with...
...Nouns, adjectives, slogans, articles, titles—all pour out in a profusion of articulation, thereby filling his life with a buffer of wit and word...
...In case he hasn't made that fact clear—as if he hasn't said enough— the narrator of Good as Gold reminds us that he "was spending an awful lot of time in this book eating and talking...
...Some college professor...
...But Bruce Gold is a man twice alienated...
...Doubly alienated, he shields himself by way of an articulate, distancing irony...
...Sid forever misquotes trite banalities, yet when Bruce speaks up to correct him, he is considered unbrotherly and pedantic...
...Doomed to a terminal inadequacy of the self-conscious variety, this hero unpacks his heart with words—but the bag never empties...
...He is a man running, speeding, speaking, in order to get in...
...Don't you understand...
...Nothing is ever enough because Gold feels nothing...
...It is ten years since Philip Roth borrowed, from the outrage of the sixties, the shrill voice of complaint which fuels his "geshrei...
...All he must do in order to receive it is to write a major book, dump his wife of so many years, and marry a tall, gentile woman of some social clout...
...His mother dead, his father clearly despising him (Pere Gold once introduces Bruce as "my son's brother"), always humiliated by his boorish family, Gold attempts to be accepted in a larger world—to be taken in unto the gentile bosom...
...He speaks with such glibness, such speed of wit and tongue, that he speaks faster than the speed of meaning...
...His casual comments become immortal phrases: "You boggle my mind," and "I don't know...
...Pineapple...
...Heller is obsessed with the language of the mouth: with food, hunger, the desire to ingest and become one with...
...Gold's obsession with Henry Kissinger is far closer to his book on the Jewish experience in America than he understands...
...Ellen Golub is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania...
...Warm...
...He is driven, wracked with the desire for more, more...
...Belle, he can say little...
...In an age where English courses fail to attract students, Gold fills his classes to overflowing by creating the most innovative sounding courses, such beauties as "Dante, Hell, Fire, and Faulkner," "Blake, Contemporary American Photography in Film and Literature," "The Role of Women, Blacks, and Drugs in Sex and Religion in World and American Film and Literature...
...Eisenhower: the WASP who's got it made...
...Gold has caught the eye of the President and hopes for a high government appointment...
...For his children, he has contempt...
...There were heavy hams...
...BENENA...
...Good as Gold is filled up with dialogue...
...If he could say what troubled him, Alexander Portnoy believed he could stop being "the son in the Jewish joke...
...If he is quiet, the error is soon discovered and they say, Hah...
...Short...
...As Portnoy sang out from Dr...
...Upon their first meeting he asks what she'd like to be called...
...Heller has perhaps found the perfect setting for the Catch 22 world in the American Jewish life of Bruce Gold...
...A quieter, grown-tired voice, it is funnier than Portnoy's: mellower, older, resigned...
...The friends of his childhood are shown either, like Lieberman, to be sleezy hacks, mediocre minds easily bought by invitations to the White House, or, like Harris Rosenblatt, turncoats who, able to temporarily deny their Jewishness, say, "I used to be Jewish...
...I was smarter, Bruce...
...Gold, the wiser Portnoy, knows that escape from the double bind is impossible...
...We had no words for them, Bruce...
...What Bruce Gold offers Washington, the President, and New-some is language, speech, things to fill the mouth and the vacuum of meaning that exists on the national scene...
...What's the Jewish word for orange...
...Spielvogel's couch, he hoped to cure his affliction, to find the right words for his melody...
...Bruce Gold's major task, set on the first page of this novel, is to write a book on the Jewish experience in America...
...Aha, yes, but in order to acquire this woman, in order to write this book, he must first be appointed to the position...
...but this, for four hundred odd pages, he can only speak...
...Yet, he never does sit down to write it...
...White," said Gold...
...it is the balm of resignation, sent to replace the intolerability of feeling...
...He makes his presidential connection via Ralph Newsome, the only man he ever knew who graduated Princeton University...
...Those all come from the tropics...
...Its language is the speech of oxymoron...
...Make war, said Nixon, and he made war...
...In Yiddish...
...But all his chicanery is of little help or offense...
...He can never be accepted by his parents...
...It is the desire to get inside that keeps him outside...
...Bruce is the college professor, yet it is Sid, his brother, who is accepted as the family sage...
...In the absence of feeling he presents words: notebooks, articles, statements, dialogues...
...He says that "Things have changed...
...There were pans of biscuits and baskets of eggs, rashers of bacon and kettles of fish, creamers and crocks and gallipots brimming, compotes and hoppers and casseroles steaming, dry cereals in bushels and hot ones in cauldrons, platters of sausage and trays of beef, kegs of butter and bins of cheese, urns of fresh milk and jugs of hot coffee, and condiments in cruets, flagons, and flasks...
...And then there's Kissinger, a man from the other side who's made it by trying to ignore his Jewishness...
...Success in the inner circle...
...Food is the libidinal language of the Jews, the central metaphor through which one conveys essential attitudes toward being in the world...
...Short...
...And like the Hebrew prophets, he denies that he can even speak it...
...Too much, too much, was the cry of his soul...
...His fingers trembled and he could hardly look...
...But as he is told by the Texas governor, "Gold, every Jew should have a big gentile for a friend, and every successful American should own a Jew...
...He asks to be taken both literally and ironically concurrently so that his play with language, his facility with words, becomes a non-referential system fostering and ricocheting the hollow echoes of his absurd world...
...there is no escape from the fate of Bruce Gold, and in his trying to escape, he is all the more encumbered...
...Catch 22...
...In post-sixties America, Joseph Heller has given up the illusion of elusion...
...So he takes us home with him, recording faithfully the dialogue of the Jewish family with itself and its son...
...Cold...
...He knows that a Jew needs friends in Washington because he doesn't belong...
...The only emotion Gold expresses, perhaps in the entire book, occurs when his brother, Sid, tells him that the deprived Jews of the shtetl had no words for tropical fruits...
...It is anything but the Jewish experience in America...
Vol. 4 • May 1979 • No. 5
