Books: Change in Gold

NICKEL MISERIES (210 pp.)—Ivan Gold —Viking ($3.95).

Many a talent has first sprouted in the subsidized soil of the little magazines and lived to proliferate in the world of letters at large. Will it happen to Ivan Gold?

Gold's first story, A Change of Air, appeared in the Columbia Review ten years ago. Its material was a little special: it concerned the statutory rape, 160 times during 70 hours by a total of 53 persons ("the entire membership of the Werewolves, their younger brothers and friends"), of a girl named Bobbie Bedmer, who had become tired of working in a button factory. The interest in the story lay not in the event (which was treated for what it is worth as a documentary oddity), but in the girl's recovery of her innocence. Critic Lionel Trilling, a professor at Columbia and a great little-magazine man himself, could hardly believe that it was written by an undergraduate. "A remarkable accomplishment," said Trilling, and asked a rhetorical question that is still valid: "How would the young author go on from that?"

On the basis of this volume, Gold's growth has been minimal. The characteristic note is of the sensitive outsider ruminating on his own alienation. The landscape abounds in psychological booby traps; the interior monologues meander without benefit of punctuation marks.

All You Faceless Voyagers, a parable about violence, tells of the damage that can be done to someone by a lunatic armed with a fistful of keys. The Nickel Misery of George Washington Carver Brown studies a Negro soldier going through basic training and treats him as a sort of super-minority—the classic fall guy, mocked and persecuted even by his fellow Negroes. Taub East takes up the theme of alienation and minorities in terms of an amateur rabbi—an enlisted man in occupied Japan—brooding about his kinship with the eta, the "unmentionable outcast class, persecuted in accord with antique, hallowed laws."

Gold might raise his sights if he could be persuaded that the ultimate minority —an individual man—is the supreme subject of fiction. He is too good a man for the dollar-dreadful trade.