Herbert Gold was a legend of the San Francisco scene as novelist, memoirist and poet, long-time friend of Allen Ginsberg and once described by the Washington Post as a ‘Beat-adjacent’ writer, a man who lived within a year of a personal century before succumbing in late 2023.
Now Gold’s identical twin sons Ari and Ethan have created an illustrated verse collection which pays tribute to their late father and celebrates the relationship between parent and children, with poems by all three featured in the new volume.
Bay Area bard and regular Rock and the Beat Generation contributor JONAH RASKIN reports on this unusual transgenerational venture…
JAN KEROUAC inhabited and expanded the house that Jack built. Allen Ginsberg’s literary offspring have gone on howling for decades. Now, the identical twins – and Gen X’ers – Ari and Ethan Gold are carrying on the torch that their father Herbert Gold ignited and sustained for four decades in San Francisco’s North Beach, the epicenter of the Beats, in his un-Beat novels and memoirs such as The Man Who Was Not With It and Bohemia: Digging the Roots of Cool.
Ari is mostly a filmmaker; his brother Ethan mostly a musician, both based in Los Angeles and both very much at home in San Francisco. They are also poets whose work, along with their father’s, is collected in an illustrated book which is cleverly titled Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems. Rare Bird has just released the book; a movie in which they ‘play themselves’, titled Brother Verses Brother, mostly set in North Beach, is in the works.
The more than 100 hundred poems, along with the photos which hold the book together, offer a family portrait of Ari, Ethan, Herb, and Herb’s first wife Melissa. Herb wrote verse intensely near the end of his life, and continued to do so until he died at the age of 99 in November 2023.
In the introduction to the book, Ari writes, ‘Mortality is the imagination’s greatest engine.’ He adds that his father revisited poetry as he neared his ‘exit’ from life. Herb had written poems as a teenager in the late 1930s and early 1940s, gave it up, joined the US army and served until the end of World War II.
Pictured above: Father figure, novelist Herbert Gold
Ari took up poetry during the pandemic when he belonged to a group of poets who shared their work on a video platform and created a virtual community. ‘This experience over Zoom made me realize I might be able to spark a deep dialogue with my father during lockdown, by sending him poems through the mail and asking for poems in return,’ Ari says. ‘I was thrilled that he responded with such vigor.’ His brother joined the conversation and added his own voice to theirs.
A soft launch for Father Verses Sons took place in the North Beach Public Library which boasts a special section with the works of the Beat Generation writers. The packed event at the library was co-sponsored by City Lights Bookstore just a few blocks away on Columbus Avenue. Herb’s daughters and many of his friends attended. City Lights' events coordinator Peter Maravelis played the master of ceremonies and asked questions. Ari responded candidly. The audience was all ears.
A day after the launch, I chatted with Ari at the Golden Sardine, a new wine bar and poetry venue – in spitting distance of City Lights – with a name drawn from The Golden Sardine, the title of a collection of poems by Bob Kaufman, a man often described by his Beat brothers as ‘the Black Rimbaud’.
Yes, the Beats go on in North Beach, and so does Herbert Gold who carved out a trajectory of his own that paralleled the Beat orbit. City Lights published the Kaufman collection in 1967 three years before Ari was born.
For a few weeks before and after the book launch Ari bicycled around North Beach, the neighborhood he knows as well if not better than any of the Beat luminaries. He tells me that he likes to think of Father Verses Sons as a ‘scrap book that someone might find in an old barn.’
‘I don’t think there’s another book like it,’ Ari says of new volume. I think he’s right, in part because it features poems by the three Golds, father and two sons, and because it honors Herb who died in his Russian Hill apartment, sometimes described as a ‘Beatnik hovel’, where he lived for decades.
Pictured above: The new collection just published by Rare Bird
Ari says that Herb kept thinking that he might outlast death. That sentiment is expressed in many of the poems published in Father Verses Sons, perhaps most notably in ‘Include Me in the Vaudeville’ that boasts the line ‘I plan to win the battle against old age’.
Year after year, Herb Gold triumphed over the inexorable and the unavoidable. ‘He had a long time to think about Death,’ Ari says. ‘He would observe that everyone in his circle was dying. He thought of himself as the last man standing.’ In many ways he was.
Allen Ginsberg died more two decades before him. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who co-founded City Lights in the early 1950s, almost outlasted him. Ferlinghetti died at 101 in 2021. City Lights never published Gold’s work, even though he lived a short uphill walk from the bookstore and often met friends at 261 Columbus Avenue, a destination for bohemians, Beats and the literati.
Like Ferlinghetti himself, Gold didn’t belong to the Beat Generation, although like Kerouac and Ginsberg, he was born in the mid-1920s and experienced many of the same cultural and political upheavals they experienced.
Troubled by Kerouac’s use and abuse of alcohol, his refusal to embrace his daughter, Jan and by the expressions of anti-Semitism he inherited from his mother, Herb kept his distance from the King of the Beats and the dharma bums, though he was a lifelong friend of Ginsberg.
Pictured above: Sons and brothers…Ethan and Ari in musical mode
Many of the obits for Herb pointed out that he disapproved of Kerouac’s lifestyle, but his disapproval now seems rather insignificant in the larger literary picture of their creativity. Still, Herb wrote about themes including marriage and family, their sorrows as well as their joys, usually not associated with Kerouac.
After his stint in the US Army and graduation from Columbia, Herb landed in San Francisco in 1960 and never left, though he often traveled to and wrote about Haiti, most memorably in Best Nightmare on Earth. ‘The title of that book accurately reflects how he felt about Haiti,’ Ari explained. He followed his father to the Caribbean and has traveled far and wide to satisfy his wanderlust.
In Father Verses Sons, Ari writes about his Jewish grandfather who left Europe to survive anti-Semitism and settled in America. He writes about the ‘death, murder, war, heartbreak’ that held the Old World hostage, and he links European carnage to Jamaican culture and the Jamaican landscape.
In ‘A Blessing for Toots Hibbert’, Ari honors Toots and the Maytals. His all-time favorite album, he says, is the soundtrack to the movie The Harder They Come starring Jimmy Cliff, which took the world by storm in the 1970s and gave the Bee Gees’ soundtrack to Saturday Midnight Fever a run for its money.
The titles of many of Herb’s novels, such as My Last Two Thousand Years and Still Alive! A Temporary Condition, reflect his wry sense of humor, which Ari seems to have inherited, and that’s apparent in many of his poems.
Divided into 12 chapters with titles such as ‘Young Love and Other Disasters’, ‘They Fuck You Up’ and ‘A Doodle for Dying’, the book moves from youth to old age, boyhood to adulthood. Herb’s and Ari’s poems occupy the heart and soul of the book. They face one another on opposite pages in a kind of cross-generational dialogue. Ethan’s poem, ‘Death’, which appears at the very end of the book, offers a blank page.
Herb’s verses tend to be short and pithy. They explore melancholy and loss. Ari’s poems are expansive and elusive. Page 88 reproduces the title page to a story that he wrote as a boy with help from Herb. It’s titled ‘I Left my Head in San Francisco’, a play on Tony Bennett’s classic ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’, and offers illustrations by Ari who, after all is said and done, loves the city, especially North Beach.
His mother, Melissa, Herb’s first wife, is a tangible as well as an intangible presence in the poems. Herb and Melissa separated when Ari was a kid. Herb was not around very much when Ari was growing up, while his step-father was an all-too immediate presence. The step-father figures in two poems in Father Verses Sons. Ari has enough material in his own past to fuel his own creativity for decades to come.
Melissa died, along with the impresario Bill Graham, in a freak helicopter crash in 1991. The helicopter hit an electrical tower during a violent storm. Through psychomagic, a symbolic, prescriptive art-therapy invented by the shaman-cum-filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ari aimed to come to terms with his mother’s traumatic death.
He wore her clothing and traveled in a helicopter through the same electrical towers that zapped the helicopter in which she and Graham were traveling at night. One might say that he will do anything to make art. Ari’s forthcoming film about his mother’s life, death, and his own experience with psychomagic is actually called Helicopter.
To this day, he’s haunted by his mother’s death and inspired by his father’s long albeit imperfect life. ‘He remained willing to change, to listen, to grow and to be flexible until his dying day,’ Ari says. As a role model, Herb Gold is, shall we say, unbeatable.
Note: Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems by Herbert Gold and Ari Gold, with Ethan Gold was published by Rare Bird last month