Heart of the Artichoke
DAVIS, ROBERT GORHAM
Heart of the Artichoke fathers By Herbert Cold Random House. 308 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by robert gorham davis Professor of English, Columbia University In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the...
...He deals with this in his own way by paying $50 to two young racketeers who waylay the farmer and send him to the hospital, carefully avoiding permanent injury...
...In his best fiction his self?or various slightly fictionalized versions of that self, wittily, wryly, affectionately observed????stays between us and the world...
...In Fathers no such natural reversal occurs...
...A long summer camp sequence included here is only indirectly related to the theme of fatherhood...
...He lovingly waters fresh lettuce heads morning and night...
...Later he moved to Ohio, started a store, came to terms with racketeers, grew more and more prosperous, moved to a suburb where there were no other Jewish families, finally sold the store and devoted himself entirely to real estate...
...Sam at 80 is unchanged, still taking risks, still speculating...
...The bout is ended by an air raid...
...He would have said, if he could, that writing is like speculation, deploying the materials of life in an abstract formulation...
...Herbert's first job as camp counselor made him feel he was like his father, "earning money and striding through the world as a model for others...
...When Sam Gold, as a boy of 12...
...The artichoke eating is symbolic...
...He taught his clerks the art of packing strawberries so that as tew as possible would seem to fill a box...
...Gold metaphysicalizes a father who, "in his effort at control of the shivering void . . . had long ago sworn without words to make some abstract unity of the flesh and sense pummeling about him...
...His stomach was full of notions...
...Sam left Russia as a free thinker and Socialist...
...His morals were thoroughly pragmatic...
...He had poked his own star in the night...
...When the elder Golds come to visit the author in San Francisco, they are not simply on a plane, but floating "through the thin air between outer space and America...
...It is all out there...
...Reviewed by robert gorham davis Professor of English, Columbia University In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the painter Lily Briscoe works hard trying to put proper centers in her paintings, to make up for the lack of a center in her life...
...In Gold's last novel Salt the main characters, who are two halves of his self, work as stock broker and advertising executive respectively, and when they are not at these jobs, they think principally about women...
...Artichokes at the top of a load tell him the condition of those at the bottom...
...His relaxation on Sundays was to go to the Russian bath and gamble at cards with an ardor that left Herbert feeling peculiarly left out...
...But they were very fine strawberries...
...The symbolic outline which transcended the real figures" fades away and we are back in onrushing time with its memories and expectations, requirements and refusals...
...Certainly in courage and energy Sam Gold is superbly typical of the Jewish immigrants who came to America at the turn of the century...
...To write was to imitate his father in another medium...
...He would find it, or until he found it, he would remain a young man looking...
...When Sam Gold attacked an artichoke, he peeled with both hands simultaneously, "the leaves flying toward his mouth . . . until with a groan that was the trumpet of all satisfaction he attained the heart...
...He had rejected the synagogue and sought nothing in its place, had no interest in charities or politics or ideas in general...
...When Sam Gold first makes love on the grass to the girl he later marries, he finds something in America even better than gold, "rich as ripe fruit, as a squirting pear...
...But the Socialism vanished...
...And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolic, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife...
...His workers liked him, and he had a strong sense of family...
...Shocks of celery squeak with delight when his father girdles them with rubber bands...
...He moves delightfully back and forth from what they say to what they mean to say to what he wishes they could have said instead...
...When Herbert, influenced by the values of the suburb where his father has chosen to live, says he hates the store and is through working in it, father and son fight bloodily in the kitchen, crashing together on the floor at the mother's feet...
...the spell suddenly is broken...
...In Salt the two characters, the two sides of Gold, nearly kill each other in a brutal street fight over the girl Barbara...
...Such purgative solving of insoluble problems through personal violence climaxes both Fathers and Salt...
...Much of this appreciation of life centers around or is symbolized by food...
...Fresh fruits and vegetables are both ephemeral and eternal...
...Herbert Gold universalizes through a process of abstracting much like that described in To the Lighthouse...
...When Herbert is depressed and ill after failure in marriage, his father comes "in love and power" to give practical help...
...He liked financial speculation, but not speculation about the character of his own life...
...A juvenile free-thinker and Socialist, defying his father, the rabbi, the Tsar, he chose the name Gold to show what he expected of America...
...In Fathers history can break into the Golds' private lives only by using the word "kike" as a crowbar...
...The father expressed it in action, the son in words, in the witty, ironic, affectionate, observant style that makes Herbert Gold a delight to read, especially in reminiscences of childhood...
...Abstractions are named as if they were as firm to the touch as the Pascal celery in the bins at his father's store...
...The strength of the book is in the rich appreciation of the concrete immediacies of life, shared by father and son...
...they in turn are watching their children play ball...
...But in Fathers, from a frustrated love of Sam Gold out of which these later frustrations undoubtedly sprang, he has been able to create a magnificent portrait of a man vigorously centered in a world which, however restricted and untranscendant, is one he entirely made and almost entirely likes...
...Cheating and being cheated were part of the game...
...determined to leave Russia for America, "he thought all this through with great care, sorting it out and looking at the last star of morning, fixing it like the star in his mind in case the rabbi tried to work magic upon him in order to make him forget or deny or surrender...
...Sometimes he lived for a week on a few hard rolls...
...The maiming seems to be passed on in another inner or symbolic form to later generations, and leaves the younger Gold, divorced, living apart from children who can never know him as he knows his father...
...His workers dine richly on food just on the verge of spoiling, "avocado pears with one bad spot and a hump of succulence...
...In the failing light, under the evening star, "they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances...
...The strength of this book is not in any sense of change, involvement or governing structure of ideas...
...Fathers ends with a terrible account of the systematic maiming of Jewish children in Russia to keep them out of the Tsar's Army...
...Gold has a perfect ear for speech, especially the speech of his Jewish relatives...
...He can "love and like," as one of his collections is titled, but Peter Hatten in Salt finds that "pleasure did not satisfy, love did not...
...As a tribute to Sam Gold, Fathers celebrates "the power and light of his world, in which the great issues of birth, love, creation, and death were exercised in action with my mother, vegetables, and the Saturday specials...
...Space, sky and star all announce the archetypical...
...Herbert first makes love to his later wife after sharing "the luscious sweetness of cantaloupe on a thick rug in front of a fireplace...
...On the other hand, an experience which would seem crucial is totally omitted...
...In Salt, after breaking with Sarah, Peter Hatten eats ravenously a whole bowl of fruit, the thick juice squirting on his hands...
...They have the same names, but the Dan Ber-man of that book has turned back into Herbert Gold...
...Other sections appeared later, also as independent stories...
...This is why Gold's fiction seems uncentered, why it yearns for an indefinable transcendence, unrelated to any solid structure of belief or ideas...
...I look into a girl's eyes and think I find solidarity, love, the truth of my days and nights, past and to come...
...The section of Fathers which culminates in strangling and cracking of ribs was published in 1951 as a story, "The Heart of the Artichoke...
...so is fatherhood itself...
...Starvation in New York had no reality...
...In Gold's lesser love stories girls are often little more than fruit to be savored, and then thrown away...
...Totally alone in New York at 13, he concentrated on saving money to bring his brothers and sisters to America...
...This explains why, though the parts of the book are often beautifully finished and deeply moving, there is a certain incoherence in the whole...
...Lily is observing the Ramsay parents on the lawn...
...She is fascinated by the way fleeting scenes and events can suddenly pause and take on universality...
...there was something more...
...The year away provided experience for his novel of carnival life, his best formed and most cohesive novel, The Man Who Was Not With It, which appeared in 1956...
...The references to universals are chiefly devices of style, which express yearning rather than articulated thought...
...It glittered...
...There the central character, though much younger, is able to play a father's role to a former father figure who badly needs him...
...Herbert hears the same word in the Army, and the captain lets him fight (with 16-inch gloves) the man who said it...
...Herbert, though a successful novelist, remains the son, with his artichoke's heart yet to be reached...
...And yet the son did not rebel in the name of a totally different set of organizing values...
...This is "a year wandering on the road, living out a fantasy of rebellion from Cleveland," which came immediately before Gold's entering Columbia in 1942, and which he mentions in "A Selfish Story," published since Fathers...
...And for the son words come to "weigh and taste and curve in the hand like a ripe fruit or the touch of another...
...With his own stick...
...Throughout his writing life Herbert Gold has sought, like Lily Briscoe, for some organizing center in his work and even more in himself...
...I was trying not merely to knock him out, but to kill him...
...The son imagines that the father has always been saying, however wordlessly, "I give you the sky, the earth, the stars and your freedom...
...Sam hears the word from a Black Legionnaire farmer who threatens to make life intolerable for him at the wholesale market...
...But when the daughter runs up to her mother and her mother asks about some people not on the scene, "Haven't they come back yet...
...In Fathers, it stands between us and his father, whose life, unlike the son's, is almost obsessively centered...
...In America, though he could never forget about money, he reached out exuberantly toward experience, bought green shoes, a motorcycle, a gold tooth, frequented a skating rink where he met Herbert's mother...
...Many of the youthful characters in Fathers we know already from Therefore Be Bold...
Vol. 50 • May 1967 • No. 11
