Herbert Gold was one of many bright presences in the literary world of New York in the fifties, his name and work often cited as part of a band of talented young achievers of that time and place that included Harvey Swados, Saul Bellow, Vance Bourjaily, George P. Elliott and Bernard Malamud. None of them had a best seller of literary acclaim like Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead) or William Styron (Lie Down in Darkness), but all produced good, fresh fictional work, thumbing their noses at the gray-flannel critics whose theme song was “the novel is dead,” crooned to the tune of lamenting violins. When Bellow broke from the pack in the critical sweepstakes and crossed the finish line first in Stockholm, I wished he'd accepted the Nobel Prize for all of them—a recognition of the verve and vision of a whole generation of postwar writers who believed in the power and beauty of prose, and on one small island in a quick, unappreciated decade, forged a body of literature. (I don't begrudge Bellow the prize; I only mean that if the critical dice had rolled in a different direction along the way, it might have been Herb or Harvey, or others I haven't cited who came of age when my own contemporaries were in college or Korea.)

Fresh out of Columbia, I was impressed to meet Herb Gold and learn he was also an alumnus, another former student of our dynamic duo, poet Mark Van Doren (who served as literary editor and film critic for The Nation) and critic Lionel Trilling, during the undergraduate era of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. I'd admired a snappy short story Herb wrote called “The Heart of the Artichoke,” and his early novel The Prospect before Us. He was a wiry, handsomely dark-haired young man (though I thought of anyone eight years older who had published a novel as a wise elder) who seemed to bounce on the balls of his feet when he walked, springing along upper Broadway or the streets of the Villages as if he might with the next step bound over traffic and across an intersection with no effort at all. I noticed his gait because he liked to invite friends to go for long walks while they talked of life, love and literature, instead of discussing these crucial matters over drinks. Herb drank at the literary watering holes, of course, like the White Horse Tavern; but sometimes if you went to visit him in the afternoon he offered you tea instead of bourbon and proposed a long walk afterward, habits so unusual for writers of the era that I secretly regarded him as something of a health nut!

Herb left New York for San Francisco in 1960, and established himself on Russian Hill (which “seeps downward” into North Beach) as a literary and civic fixture. I ran into him out there in 1967, appropriately enough, in the City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's historic outpost of the San Francisco Renaissance of the fifties.

If Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco, Herb “found my home” there, he tells us in his new book on Bohemia, discovering “Left Bank Paris and Greenwich Village in a permanent laboratory condition, wrapped in a convoluted time warp of past and future within the instant present tense of California.” He has kept “the same flat on Russian Hill for over thirty years now,” finding there “communitas” and “a variety of stability,” noting, “These sticky things are roots.”

The roots must nourish Herb well, for he has continued to flourish as a writer of novels (from Birth of a Hero in 1951 to Dreaming in 1988, with fourteen others in between), reportage and memoir (most recently Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti in 1991), short stories and essays (including Love and Like and The Age of Happy Problems) over four-plus decades, a total of twenty-five volumes; counting this latest one. Herb once wrote a witty, insightful poem on how to avoid writer's block, but I can't figure out when he suffered from it. He has also lived and done his work in New York, Paris and Haiti, and his vigorous literary output seems to flourish in any geography—at least as long as it's the local bohemian section, to which he always gravitates, as we learn in his lively new literary tourist guide.

The bohemia that Herb is reporting on, of course, is “far from that Bohemia in the neighborhood of Prague, once a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” What he calls the “Bohemian archipelago” can now be found in “urban places, college towns, encampments everywhere, in the new world and the old.” Look for it “in all the interstices of a society that still requires art, imagination, laziness, adventure and possibility unwilled by family and employment.”

Gold finds bohemia not only in the well-known centers like Greenwich Village and the Left Bank of Paris but also in unlikely spots like Tonopah, Nevada (where a blackjack dealer whispered she had a subscription to The New York Review of Books). His own bohemian explorations have taken him from Chicago's Rush Street and L. A.'s Sunset Strip to the Blue Bird Cafe in Moscow; from Key West to “both Venices” and the Bodeghita del Media in Havana. He finds bohemia in Israel, not only in Tel Aviv cafes but also “a motley encampment in the desert near a spring not far from Eilat” where an eye-patched hippie in cowboy clothes sells barbecued lamb and cold beer. Most impressive of all, Herb even finds “outposts of Bohemia” in his own hometown of Cleveland, which he fled for Morningside Heights en route to Greenwich Village nearly half a century ago, sighting “a few health food stores, espresso machines, and bookshops at Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry.”

Herb must have been as shocked to see such symbols of bohemia in Cleveland as I was to discover that the neighborhood where I grew up in Indianapolis, a benign and sleepy district of middle-class conservatism with the appropriately bucolic name “Broad Ripple,” had become a hotbed of espresso bars, art galleries and poetry readings, a new Left Bank in the heart of Hoosierland. My father saw it coming with dread back in the late sixties: “There's a place where they sell that thick black coffee—the kind like sludge—right in Broad Ripple!” He knew what it signified because he had visited me in Greenwich Village and asked at the Limelight Cafe if the people wearing blue jeans and beards were—he whispered the word—beatniks. You expected all kinds in New York, but now they were even in Broad Ripple. The bohemians were inside the gates.

Herb Gold—my fellow bohemian refugee from our fathers' Midwest—describes himself today as “this wandering beatnik emeritus, now a middle-aged greybeard,” but I argue the accuracy of the image. I saw him a year ago for the first time since our '67 encounter, and while he indeed sports a handsome gray beard, I question his credentials as a past or present beatnik.

When the Beat phenomenon exploded in the middle fifties, via the double detonation of Ginsberg's “Howl” ('56) and Kerouac's On the Road ('57), most of us West Village writers (as distinguished from the new East Village of the Beats) were critical, to say the least. We were traditional or “proper” bohemians (what Seymour Krim called “the writer writers”) rebelling against Eisenhower, Henry Luce and those two symbolic thoroughfares, Wall Street and Madison Avenue, but not against the form of poetry and novel, our own literary heritage, which we saw not only as the best vessels of art and truth but as weapons against the oncoming tide of mass culture, mass thought, the Organization Man, the numbing of sensibility, the prophets of what Herb Gold labeled back then “The Age of Happy Problems.”

We regarded the rise of the new antiform writers and poets, led by Kerouac and Ginsberg, as breakers of the best literary traditions, the ones that were also under attack from Luce and Life magazine on the right, who complained that American writers were too negative (Faulkner and Tennessee Williams were prime targets) and ought to emphasize the upbeat side of our society. The Beats, enshrined now as the bohemians of the fifties, were regarded with suspicion or hostility by us “proper Bohemians” then, who saw “beatniks” as false prophets and pretenders.

In the pages of this magazine, Herb Gold called On the Road “proof of illness rather than a creation of art, a novel,” and described Ginsberg's “Howl” as “blathering.” He was hardly alone in these attacks from the bohemian left; The Nation's poetry editor M. L. Rosenthal called “Howl” “the single-minded frenzy of a raving madwoman [sic].” I wrote an acid account in The Nation of Kerouac giving a drunken reading of his work at the Village Vanguard, comparing him unfavorably to the formalist poet Richard Wilbur, who gave a (sober) reading that same night. Most of my Village bohemian friends agreed with James Baldwin, who loved Henry James and put down Kerouac, Ginsberg and friends for their enchantment with Zen, dubbing them “the Suzuki rhythm boys.” Village Voice iconoclast Krim criticized Kerouac's “non-stop gush.”

Herb reports that in Paris at age 33 he “renewed my college friendship with Allen Ginsberg,” and several decades later in San Francisco was accused by a new young bohemian of hanging out with the “eastern establishment” when seen on the street with the author of “Howl.” Ginsberg has become part of the establishment (“a peculiar national treasure of sorts,” Time grudgingly acknowledged). Most of us during the onrushing decades have come to appreciate the breakout power of the early Beat work, especially the insight and wit of Ginsberg's poetry, whose staying power has made him a worldwide influence—and probably, ironically, our most well-known and well-loved national poet since Robert Frost.

Although Herb Gold has mellowed his opinions from the proper bohemianism of the fifties, it is obvious in his new book that he retains one of the basic values of our generation: You are what you produce; it's the work that counts. What dismayed so many of us about the “beatniks” was that they followed the original Beats like Ginsberg and Kerouac in style but not in substance; they dressed and spoke as artists, musicians, poets, but didn't paint, play or write anything.

The old work ethic of the fifties (our motto was Henry James's “produce; produce again; produce again better than ever and all will be well!”) still operates in Herb's current explorations of bohemia. What drives him nuts are those who live the bohemian life but don't produce. He describes with disdain a man he calls “Crandall” in Mallorca, who “dined out (drank out) on his thirty-year literary project,” which he's never finished. This “would-bee” writer keeps going on “brandy, chemistry, and an occasional temporary muse among the winter visitors,” Herb reports, and will no doubt continue as long as there is “strength in his arms and a check from home.” In the “Upper Bohemia” of Coconut Grove, Florida, Herb meets a man whose profession is “blocked novelist” and gives him good, solid advice from the ethic of our generation: “Write! Just write!”

Herb admires those who do, even when they aren't his cup of tea. He gives the devil's due to William Burroughs, acknowledging that “thanks to the good equipment he had inherited, and hard work, he tinkered with the controls until he opened the locks into his nightmares.” In other words, he wrote, and still writes, books. With similar admiration, Herb says Henry Miller was “reinventing American Bohemia, reinventing the American rogue and urban slave, mapping the road away from a massified society.”

It is these creators who Herb argues make bohemia possible: “The Bohemian masses exist in the aura of those few leaders who actually originate music, fine art, literature, fashion. … The would-bees take their honey from the flowers of creation.”

I'm reminded of James Baldwin, another of our proper bohemians of the fifties, who used to quote to me the admonition of an old professor he met at Howard University who urged him to remember his work came first, even above political activism, and that his goal should be to have “a shelf of books” at the end of his life. Baldwin would add with emphasis: “Remember, baby—a whole shelf.”

Herb Gold has his shelf, and adds another good volume to it with his vigorous travels in Bohemia.