Heart of the Matter:
STEVENSON, DAVID L.
Heart of the Matter Love and Like. By Herbert Gold. Dial. 307 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by David L. Stevenson Department of English, Western Reserve University HERBERT GOLD IS one of the most...
...He admits to himself that she is only "that beautiful and perhaps silly girl...
...After the blows, the father is caught with "the first tears of old age" closeted in the bathroom "with the water running in the sink so that no one would hear an old man with an ingrate son...
...The first of these stories gives us a portrait of a young college professor fleeing his marital unhappiness into a love affair with a student...
...As he often did, he tried to think of what would happen to the children...
...It is a terrifying depiction of the bitter conflict of will and ego between husband and wife from which all romance, all tenderness finally escape...
...my father a spendthrift!—such knowledge comes late to me now...
...The reader is caught with a vivid awareness of what it was like to have been the someone else of his own growing-up, stripped of the identity which years of mere living create: still warily innocent, still at the beginnings of a lonely, private battle for love and belonging...
...It is not the photographic grotesquerie of people in the act of sex which we find in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer...
...He remembered it with shame, his eye suddenly prickling and aching, and saw himself again covering her with kisses, forcing her mouth open while her body bent backwards, arched, received him...
...The emotional force which this story wields seems to come from a recognition of its capture of "truth" and from the mood of desperation which it projects...
...It is a tense and moving study in the bottomless need for accusation and blame on the part of men and women trapped by a used-up marriage...
...Reviewed by David L. Stevenson Department of English, Western Reserve University HERBERT GOLD IS one of the most perceptive and at the same time one of the most exuberant of the young American writers who have made their reputations since World War II...
...It is not the flat, bald exposure of the mechanics of sex of O'Hara, not the obsessive fondness for sex-in-itself of Norman Mailer, With Gold, it is more the bright fruition of an uncompulsive honesty in these matters, a sense that he has achieved not a self-conscious foray in the direction of candor, but the thing-in-itself...
...She had given herself without a word, moaning...
...That was a puzzler...
...It is part of Gold's skill that the story is not used to arouse false pathos for the boy and his father...
...He asks himself whether so luscious a creature as Sally can "stop his idea," and finds no ready answer...
...In the second of these stories, a young wife phones her husband that she has hit three children who ran in front of her car as she was turning a corner...
...Near the end, the divorced husband is consoling himself with a girl named Sally ("with her closets full of clothes, her mirrors, her pink-feathered slippers, and her music-to-dream-by...
...The story ends with the conflicts between the two generations, the two cultures, the two males, resolved by a grotesque fight in the family's kitchen...
...It seems to be a product of the almost naive lack of reticence with which Gold presents both the sexual matter at the heart of many of these stories and the physical detail by which it is evoked...
...Its achievement lies in its ability to evoke generic feelings deeper than the story itself would suggest...
...The story concludes with two of the most anguished sentences in contemporary fiction...
...The son is caught with a final evaluative reflection: "To fight back was all I needed...
...It ends on a note of poignant irony: What had been a genuine need for love to the young professor, in his carefully planned and executed adultery, turns out to be only a cheerful initiation into the rites of sex for the girl, a precautionary prelude to her first trip to Paris...
...He has not identified himself with the reading public as a stylized professional after the fashion of a J. D. Salinger, nor has he taken on any of the studied decadence of a Paul Bowles or a Truman Capote...
...Economy in Pattie [the young boy's girl...
...When the husband arrives at the scene of the accident full of tender concern, his wife, so calm and so praised by the gathered crowd, releases her excitement and fright by turning savagely on her husband...
...He discovers that even during his affair with Sally his mind has been turning more and more often to thoughts of suicide...
...Brilliant as it is, "The Heart of the Artichoke" is an early story of Gold's, and in subject matter at least (as the title of the collection suggests) is not really representative of the kind of fiction he writes now...
...It could be called the classic story of the kind of modern American marriage which lasts about 10 years, creates two children, slowly turns sour and ends in the disaster of divorce...
...It is this achievement which gives his fiction its power to add measurably to our non-clinical awareness of the nature of the human condition...
...His appeal, like that of such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, George Elliott and Harvey Swados, has been to the general American audience which, before the war, read Hemingway and Steinbeck, not Djuna Barnes or Virginia Woolf...
...I do not suppose that it is ever possible to state exactly why it is that one man's fiction seems to achieve an obvious significance that another man's lacks, But certainly one thing that sets Gold's stories apart, and gives them some portion of their distinction, is a peculiar kind of candor...
...The story itself is made up of familiar materials from American life: the efforts of a second generation son to repudiate his European father's way of life and preoccupation with money, and to take on, instead, an adolescent's image of suburban manners and romance...
...Of the 14 stories in Gold's book, "The Heart of the Artichoke" has been most often admired by critics and has most often appeared in anthologies...
...Two stories from Love and Like, "Paris and Cleveland are Voyages" (1957) and "The Panic Burton" (1958), are sufficiently typical of this more recent fiction...
...His later work, which dominates the collection, is largely an exploration into the intertwinings of love, marriage and the act of sex for men and women at the end of their youth, but not yet pulled by the tides of middle age...
...No example wrenched from context will wholly serve to illustrate what I mean, but perhaps this description of the husband and wife of "Love and Like," at the moment of their divorce, will serve: "They had fallen into an adulterous passion, still unshaken in their will on divorce, the adultery made painfully sweet...
...he had given too much...
...its impact goes beyond sentiment...
...At the story's end both are corroded by hatred and self-loathing...
...A bold use of detail in describing acts of sex is one of the most obvious characteristics of modern fiction...
...But part of the special individuality of Gold's writing comes from the unique tone which controls his use of the details of love-making...
...Good as these stories are (and curiously New yorker-ish sounding in summary, but not in execution), they are actually somewhat slight treatments of love and sex in comparison to the most profound of the stories in the collection, "Love and Like" (1959...
...Therefore, the recent publication of Gold's first collection of short stories, Love and Like, is a literary event which reminds one of the publication of Hemingway's Men Without Women in 1927 and of Steinbeck's The Long Valley in 1938...
Vol. 43 • June 1960 • No. 23
