Herbert Gold's Glitter
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
SPRING BOOKS Herbert Gold's Glitter By Stanley Edgar Hyman Salt (The Dial Press, 318 pp., $4.95) is Herbert Gold's sixth novel. He has also published a book of short stories and a volume of...
...and so on...
...Her shoulder sometimes tastes salty to Dan, but she can be sweetened...
...James Joyce, for one...
...She writes of Bennett: "He is trying to make us imagine for him...
...Where it counts, as in the fight between Dan and Peter, a scene desperately overwritten, Gold is a bad writer...
...The hero, Dan Shaper, the divorced young Jew from Cleveland who was the protagonist of Gold's short story, "Love and Like," here works in New York writing promotion for a mass circulation magazine...
...Now Gold and others want to undo the modern revolution, and return the novel to its Edwardian condition: the accurate texture of life, Chap Sticks and Vespas, real unhappy people with real unhappy problems...
...His anthology of short stories is called Fiction of the Fifties...
...Peter at his low point confesses that "The salt has lost its savor...
...This would be a triumph of comic invention had not Bloom's orgasm in the Gerty MacDowell episode in Ulysses been imaged as a rocket exploding—in 1921, three years before Gold was born...
...this turns out on the next page to be the Yale Club...
...Observe his similes: "like a bulb charged too high, jealousy flashed off, dead and destroyed, with a charred worm of filament inside...
...the pile of Waugh novels in "Love and Like...
...In the magazine's tests, he "scored exceptionally high in Creative Kidding," and Gold himself would score quite high in the same category...
...A number of characters in Salt cheer the spirit...
...At the climax: "Her small-small voice squeaked with delight when there finally came a little slippery silver stream in the trough...
...I have never read a successful whole by him, but, as there are in Salt, there are excellent touches scattered through his work: David walking out with his suitcase in Birth of a Hero...
...The second section is about Dan and is narrated by him...
...Another is a tall alcoholic girl Dan calls "Goneril," who makes a living by acting in pornographic films, talks in psychiatric jargon, and resists Dan until the night that he brings her home drunk, draped across the fender of a cab like a deer...
...She is writing her master's essay on "Pushups Since 1900," and she leaves Peter with a bottle of home-brewed liniment containing eucalyptus oil...
...Brown," Virginia Woolf declared the revolt of the literary generation that included Joyce, Forster and herself...
...tries to spoil the Happiness of Dan and Barbara...
...and vultures circle in the sky over the blackening bones of doormen...
...Dan has an apocalyptic vision of the end of expense accounts in New York, with Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street reverting to jungle: "Dogwood and crab grass break through the asphalt, doing their softening and crumbling work...
...In a scene unmatched in literature since Mellors and Connie Chatterley twined posies in each other's pubic hair, Dan smears "clover honey" (pure country product...
...as one bleeding girl tells him, he uses his sex like a switchblade...
...But do these bits warrant all those awards...
...Bennett and Mrs...
...There are wonderful scenes in the book...
...The End...
...Where it doesn't count, as in a funny party scene with the pornographic film industry, Gold is often a good writer...
...But Gold goes rushing into the '50s and the '60s carrying an Edwardian bundle...
...The funniest of all is Dan's boss, an ultimate Madison Avenue caricature...
...There is a mystique about coffee...
...A great many honors and awards have come his way, according to the jacket of Salt, which proclaims: "Mr...
...For example: Barbara carries salt in her pocket because she likes the taste...
...I know better writers who never got a single Fellowship...
...He pursues girls tirelessly, sadistically, and with what the trade calls "phallic aggressiveness" (thus his name...
...Where an Alan Sillitoe or a Harvey Swados does this unashamedly, Gold disguises it with a modernist surface...
...One line of insight," she observes, "would have done more than all those lines of description...
...On the surface, Salt has great appeal...
...As for the title, I noted enough references to salt to fill a tower of three-by-five cards before I gave up...
...Oooh, jackpot!' she cried...
...It turns out that Barbara is going to have a Baby, Dan's Baby...
...it is funny, touching, and seems to be right at the heart of contemporary sensibility...
...There is no trace of a plot until the last 18 pages of the book...
...Like the Angry Young Men in Britain, he represents the counter-revolution in fiction, and American novelists from James Jones to Harper Lee stand at the barricades with him...
...Salt consists of three sections...
...The episode concludes, "I never saw her again," but then Gold spoils it with: "I was disappointed...
...In part, because in the current drought there is so little new fiction worth reviewing...
...One is a graduate student in physical education at Columbia with whom Dan's friend Peter Hatten has a brief affair...
...Many of the images in Salt engage, if not the imagination, at least the fancy...
...Her ultimate judgment of the techniques of Edwardian naturalism is: "For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death...
...The description of a small boy in bloomers falling into the hippopotamus pit in the Central Park Zoo, in order to embarrass his mother, is uproarious...
...Peter's boss "insisted on putting him up for his club...
...I am sorry to have to use words like Love, Happiness, and Baby in this awful fashion, but as should be obvious, Gold has written a McCall's story of the purest hokum, the one about the city slicker who almost succeeds in destroying the pure true love between two good country folks, but is foiled in the nick of time...
...the fight between father and son in "The Heart of the Artichoke...
...Nor is salt the only important taste sensation in the book...
...And the constant sign of boundless luxury...
...There is a fine poignant scene in which Dan falls in love with an unknown beautiful girl in a Broadway supermarket, and follows her around the store, reconstructing her life from her purchases and dreaming of their joy together...
...The first centers on Peter, a green-eyed lithe stockbroker, native to New York, whose hobbies are juggling and womanizing...
...Incidentally, Shakespeare got King Lear from it...
...Where the book is interesting it is not a novel, and where it is a novel it is not interesting...
...His own will was frayed like an old rope...
...His true affinities are with H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett...
...An American Indian wearing space shoes, seen by Dan on an airplane, shows "that a Pawnee can have foot trouble, too...
...then he tells Dan about it...
...A bottle of Courvoisier...
...the boys wondering what the whore would write about them in her diary in Therefore Be Bold...
...Recently he was one of the Judges for the National Book Award in Fiction and one of the American delegates, with James Baldwin and Henry Miller, to the Formentor Prize conference...
...Beneath all this verbal coruscation and glitter, beneath the sexual frankness and the topical freshness, the substance of Salt is old-fashioned naturalism...
...Why then bother to review Salt at all...
...wouldn't you be...
...In part, because Salt is at least a readable book, not an insult to the intelligence of a three-year-old chimpanzee, like Calder Willingham's Eternal Fire, or a paralyzing bore, like Leslie Fiedler's The Second Stone—to name two recent novels that I read and decided were not worth reviewing in these pages...
...Gold has received many important literary prizes including Guggenheim and Hudson Review Fellowships, an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an O. Henry Prize and a Ford Foundation Theatre Fellowship to work at the San Francisco Actors' Workshop...
...Then Peter, out of jealousy (those green eyes...
...on Barbara's breasts and licks it off...
...I had then danced like a doomed fly with gluey feet down the flypaper path of narcissism, sadism, masochism...
...He tells a conventional story by means of traditional techniques, but he strains language to give the effect of experimentation and novelty...
...Dan beats Peter almost to death, finds Barbara hiding from shame back in Virginia (she is wearing a printed cotton housedress), and they fall into each other's arms...
...She expired under him like a small animal caught under him on the highway...
...Mostly, I suppose, because Gold is a representative figure...
...his forthcoming non-fiction anthology is subtitled Essays for the Sixties...
...A coffee house has a fioorshow consisting of "interracial chess-playing...
...on the book's last page Dan calls Barbara "the salt of the earth...
...Maimed by his bad marriage, Dan is a sad quester after Love and Happiness...
...Gold is obsessed with the contemporary...
...He has also published a book of short stories and a volume of essays...
...In a preposterous scene, he rapes Barbara...
...The sign that Barbara represents true rural value, opposed to New York's world of falsity, is that she does not serve instant coffee, whatever the temptations, but always brews proper coffee...
...A third is Tom Davenport, who works in Dan's office, and spends his lunch hours glumly in bed with one or more girls from the office, "loyal as a dog to the concept of Modern Man, to chase secretaries, receptionists, and others whom his low energy put in easy reach...
...This is most clearly visible in the touches of fake highlife in Salt...
...A semi-kosher restaurant on upper Broadway serves tacos and tequila...
...I think that all these are false clues, and that the title really comes from the variant of the Cinderella tale called "Love Like Salt," in which a king who banishes his youngest daughter, because she will say no more than that she loves him "like salt," comes to realize the vital necessity of salt, and restores her...
...In her famous 1924 manifesto against the naturalism of Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett, "Mr...
...The third section centers on Barbara Jones, a young girl from Virginia, used and discarded by Peter (she is the author of the switchblade image), who brings Dan Love and Happiness...
...Another effective scene, quite savagely funny, has Dan discover his weekend host's wife playing the slot machine in a closet off the rumpus room, and simultaneously copulating with her lover...
Vol. 46 • May 1963 • No. 10
