The cover photo of Herbert Gold’s book “Still Alive! A Temporary Condition” depicts a bedridden man with a toe-tag reading “Do not disturb.”
Not a chance Gold posed for the shot. At 84, he is vital, active and most definitely disturbed. He may have the countenance of a kindly sage, but Gold — best known as the author of the 1962 novel “Fathers” — remains a stinging literary voice that refuses to go gentle into that good night.
His publisher calls the book a memoir. Gold rejects the label. “It’s about getting older,” he says, “and memory. I didn’t intend to write a memoir.”
That’s not to say the San Francisco writer doesn’t look back. In “Still Alive!” Gold recounts growing up Jewish in a viciously anti-Semitic Cleveland neighborhood. He recalls his days as an expatriate in 1950s Paris hanging out with Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison. He writes of his beatnik brother, a frustrated writer who died never having finished the novel he’d worked on for 50 years. He writes of his good wife and his bad wife, and his five kids.
These remarkable figures populate his book, as well as his life today, even though many have already departed this world. As he recounts, “My eldest daughter tells me she doesn’t like my living alone. I’m not alone! But much of my company is now invisible because it’s only remembered.”
Though raised in a culturally Jewish home, Gold was not religious. “I associated being Jewish with being carsick,” he says, because the family would have to cross from Cleveland’s west side to its east side to attend synagogue. “It was a mysterious thing to be Jewish.”
Gold says facing the venom of anti-Semitism made him tough. A neighbor once threw an open can of sardines through his bedroom window to express her hatred. Local Catholic school kids would follow Gold home, taunting him with “Christ killer!”
Later, as a budding young author, he still faced the gentleman’s agreement. “I’m old enough to remember publishers not running a Jewish name,” Gold says, who was once asked by editors at Harper’s Bazaar to change his last name if he wanted his short story to run.
He refused. The story did eventually run, but at the back of an especially thick issue of the magazine; it was not even listed in the table of contents.
Gold moved to San Francisco in 1960, initially just for a year to work on a theater project. But, as he recalls, “I was playing tennis and lifted my racket to serve. I looked up, saw the sun beating down and said, ‘It’s New Year’s Day, I’m playing tennis, and I’m not going back to New York.’ I’ve been here temporarily for 48 years.”
Gold had the good fortune to befriend leading artistic figures. Among his pals were poet Allen Ginsberg, author Jack Kerouac, actor Zero Mostel and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia.
His turbulent friendship with the late Jewish novelist Saul Bellow makes for one of the most compelling chapters in his book. “Saul was very helpful and also very difficult,” Gold says. “It was sometimes hard to talk to him near the end.”
He remembers the literary giant as a man quite full of himself and a bit too forthcoming about marital difficulties (including problems in the bedroom), but always supportive of his fellow writers.
Though Gold was, like so many secular Jews of his generation, a leftist, he was never doctrinaire, and in some ways broke with left-wing conventions. He is staunchly pro-Israel and pro-Zionist, having covered both the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Playboy.
He also visited the Soviet Union just as the Soviet Jewry movement began heating up in the 1970s, and he got to know a number of refuseniks.
Despite his peripatetic career, Gold has lived in the same Russian Hill apartment for decades. That’s where he plans to stay until the end of his days.
Speaking of which, the Grim Reaper is another character in his book, hovering in the background. And though he realizes his own eventual demise can’t be far off, Gold seems unafraid of what Shakespeare called the “undiscovered country.”
Maybe in this, if nothing else, the enfant terrible of San Francisco letters serves as a model of fatalistic calm. “I know it’s going to happen,” he says, laughing, “but I want to postpone it.”
“Still Alive! A Temporary Condition” by Herbert Gold (249 pages, Arcade Books, $25)
Herbert Gold will appear 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 17, at Borders, 400 Post St., S.F. Information: (415) 399-1633. Also 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 18, at Book Passage, 1 Ferry Bldg. #42, S.F. Information: (415) 835-1020.