'Still Alive! A Temporary Condition' by Herbert Gold

They would be rooted rather than regional. Their sensibility would be cosmopolitan rather than provincial, though their focus would be voluntarily parochial -- not out of any limitation in taste or talent, but because they intuitively grasped the wisdom of Patrick Kavanagh's shrewd insight that Homer made "The Iliad" from "a local row."

They would, in other words, be capaciously minded authors with a sense of place.

Gold, 84, belongs irrevocably to San Francisco, where he has lived in a railroad flat on Russian Hill for nearly half a century, though he also has written movingly and knowingly of Cleveland, where he grew up; of Paris (where he spent critically formative years); and of Haiti, the other land of his heart's desire. "Still Alive! A Temporary Condition" is the story of all that and how it came about -- part memoir, part meditation on love, aging and the writer's life and altogether exhilarating reading.

At this point, Gold's bibliography includes 18 novels -- most memorably, "Fathers" and "A Girl of Forty" -- dozens of short stories, essays, criticism and a great deal of first-rate newspaper and magazine journalism. (In the interests of the now fashionable full disclosure, it must be intrusively noted that some of the latter was done for this reviewer, when, in a previous incarnation, he edited The Times' Opinion section. A mutual friend -- Allen Ginsberg -- first brought Gold's work to my attention. Subsequently, he became a frequent Opinion contributor; we shared meals and memorable conversation here in Los Angeles and at the old Washington Square Bar and Grill in North Beach.)

"Still Alive" ranges in fascinatingly discursive fashion across Gold's long career, his two marriages, his five children and an array of literary friends and comrades from Ginsberg to Saul Bellow. In terms of formal structure, this may be one of the loosest of his books, which somehow adds to the reader's pleasure. There's a certain lyric facility that comes to some writers in fortunate old age -- Hemingway had it in "A Moveable Feast" and didn't know it -- and Gold clearly revels in it here. His, though, is a lyricism spiked with aphoristic insight that reminds us he did philosophy at Columbia and the Sorbonne: