Pure Gold

I pounce on references to Cleveland, my home town, with the graceful alacrity of my Uncle Harry snagging nickels off the sidewalk. Like poet Richard Howard, cultural historian Constance Rourke and saxophonist Joe Lovano, the novelist Herbert Gold is a native Clevelander, born in 1924. Many years ago I read his early novels and retain a vaguely pleasant impression of The Man Who Was Not With It (1956), which was written in the wake of The Adventures of Augie March and shows it. In Thursday’s post I mentioned Nabokov’s praise for a story by Gold, “Death in Miami Beach,” which in fact is more likely an essay, and collected in The Age of Happy Problems (1961). The piece holds up well and has a good opening:

“The state of madness can be defined partly as an extreme of isolation of one human being from everyone else. It provides a model for dying. Only an intermittent and fragmentary awareness of others interrupts the black folding of the layers of self upon each other – this also defines the state of that dilemma known as `mental health.’”

In the same volume is “Cleveland: Inflation on the Erie,” a magazine-style feature originally published in discovery [sic] in 1951, the year before I was born. Much of it feels gleaned from the newspaper morgue and encyclopedia, but Gold gives a native son’s glimpse of the flush postwar world I entered, when Cleveland was the sixth-largest city in the country. Today, it’s thirty-third on the list and no longer even the largest in Ohio. Sounding like a winded A.J. Liebling, Gold writes:

“The water on a first-baseman’s knee, the laryngitis of a disc jockey, or another policeman surprised in an act of burglary or venery while on duty provide the staple diet of newspapers in quest of local catastrophe. Cleveland policemen obey the Philosopher’s great doctrine of the Golden Mean between penuriousness (Atlantic City) and profligacy (Beverly Hills), accepting just the amount required in favor and shakedown to send these commissioned Aristotelians to Miami Beach, Coral Gables, and a proper dignity in the sunset of their days. They are sometimes punished for the excessive taking of bribes by a lonely duty on the East Ninth Street pier, jutting onto Lake Erie, where they are told to watch out for invaders from Canada.”

Which reminds me of the Cleveland scene in Stranger than Paradise (directed by Jim Jarmusch, another Clevelander), when the New York City trio stands on the shore and stares at the blank whiteness of frozen Lake Erie. Today, I.M. Pei’s hideous glass pyramid, home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, stands where the East Ninth Street pier once stood. As to entertainment in the “Forest City,” circa 1951:

“Not long ago, a small west-side bar, far from downtown, hired Rudy Vallee for a week of the `Whiffenpoof Song’ and nostalgia about old Yale for the pleasure of the neighborhood loungers. `Big names’ visit supper clubs which used to be satisfied with high-school bands. The kids who once made out with a soda and a few nickels for the juke box are now in the habit of parking their convertibles at Moe’s Main Street and investing respectable sums in an evening with Johnny Ray (`Mr. Emotion in Person NOW’), as he puts his head against the piano, sobs briefly, and sings, `Tell the Lady I Said Good-bye.’”

Gold catalogs the city’s boosterish nickname, “The Best Location in the Nation”; “Juno, the Transparent Lady” at the city’s Health Museum; “The Mad Killer of Kingsbury Run”; Hart Crane’s brief residence; and The Flats, the industrial area along the Cuyahoga River where, 25 years after Gold’s story, Pere Ubu and other punk bands evolved. Here’s Gold on The Flats, Cleveland’s version of Blake’s “dark satanic mills,” now long gone:

“By day this area is covered with an acrid pall. By night the sky is violet, throbbing and flaring with the reflection from the blast furnaces.”

Describing himself as a flâneur, Gold closes the essay by telling of his impromptu rendezvous with “a lovely young artist” sketching the city’s skyline from The Flats. The woman mistakes his overture for an “assault, purse-snatching, or at least what is called `exposing his person.’” She runs away, leaving behind her sketch of the Terminal Tower, once the tallest building in the world outside New York City:

“She seemed to have talent. Like the spirit of Cleveland, her talent might develop with greater richness if she were more confident of her power, less speedy in the flight with money, and yet more adventurous in the exposing of her person to the risks of love.”