A CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT GOVER
By Thomas E. Kennedy
On the occasion of the republication of Gover’s One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding (Hopewell Publications, Titusville, New Jersey, 2005,
An added pleasure to my rediscovery this year of Robert Gover’s One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, reissued by Hopewell Publications in 2005, is that, thanks to the wonder of electronics and the fact that I knew the publisher, I also found myself in an email conversation with Robert Gover, between Delaware and Denmark. At 77, Gover is 15 years my senior and, to my delight, willing to answer questions about his experience of those seminal years in American cultural history of the 1950s and ‘60s when writers like Henry Miller (1891-1980), Terry Southern (1924-95), Kurt Vonnegut (1922- ), “Maxwell Kenton” (a.k.a. Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg), Joseph Heller (1923- 99), Ken Kesey (1935-2001), Jack Kerouac (1922-69), J. P Donleavy (1926- ), Warren Miller (1921-66), Elliott Baker; Ken Kolb, Bob Dylan (1941- ), Jim Morrison (1943-71), Hunter S. Thompson (1938-2005), Ishmael Reed (1938- ), and Robert Gover himself, with his One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding (1961), were helping to chase with laughter the American terror of communism as well as its sexual, linguistic, and racial hypocrisy.
My first question was which of my literary heroes of those days he had known.
Robert Gover: I made a list and was immediately struck by how many of the ones I knew are now among the Silent Majority: Henry Miller, Jim Morrison, Hunter Thompson, Raymond Carver...
Back around 1958, I sent Henry Miller a letter asking about moving to Big Sur-—would that be a good place for a striving novelist such as me? He wrote back saying, “We must each find our own Big Sur.” When he read the British edition of my first novel and raved about it, he did not recognize my name, so when we met and I reminded him of that letter I’d written him, we were both amused by the coincidence. He was in his 70s then. The last I saw of him, he was jogging down Fifth Avenue to grab a taxi to the airport, on his way back to Big Sur.
During the 1950s, I had also admired the works of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, but had no contact with either till my first novel came out. Gore Vidal’s comments about it in his regular column for Esquire Magazine gave it a tremendous boost. The publisher, Ian Ballantine, took me to visit Vidal at his family estate north of New York City along the Hudson River. This was back when Ballantine Books was Ian, his wife Betty and an editor named Bernard Shir-Cliff. Gore trudged up from the basement to serve us wine and cheese. He explained that he was broke and living in the basement to save money, and pestered Ian about reissuing his earlier works. Gore and I exchanged some banter and then discussed a sit-up board sold by Abercrombie and Fitch. You could carry it around in a suitcase and workout in hotel rooms. Gore dubbed it the “Paul Newman Memorial Sit-up Board,” as Newman was shown using it in the movie, Sweet Bird of Youth. Gore said he was embarking on a series of historical novels and was happy to be leaving Hollywood behind. But he would soon return to LaLa land for another shot of cash.
Kennedy: You and Norman Mailer both were pressured by your publishers to transform your “fuck’s” to “fug’s”. Did you and he ever meet and discuss that?
Gover: I met my hero Norman Mailer at a PEN cocktail party and was immediately knocked back on my heels when he went into a boxer’s stance and told me it wouldn’t be easy to take his title. He executed some fancy footwork and flicked out a few faux jabs and, when I didn’t join in the sparing, accused me of being psychologically armored. Actually, I was so awed by his presence that I was incapacitated. Together we knocked down a few drinks and had a few laughs. He invited me to call him in Brooklyn but, I later realized, didn’t give me his phone number.
Around this time, I met the young Bobby Dylan, then on the cusp of becoming famous. We were introduced by a journalist (whose name I do not recall) who was interviewing me when Bobby walked into the White Horse Bar in Greenwich Village. This was before “Blowin’ in the Wind” became a huge hit. Bobby and I wound up going out to dinner together at a Spanish Restaurant, where he pulled out his guitar and began singing a song he was working on. The matre d’ kicked us out. To finish dinner we went to a less upscale eatery and shared spooky tales from the dungeon where pain and mystery marry to produce the magic of inspiration. We speculated about where inspiration came from, and later that evening, Bobby took me to a basement club featuring folk singers—-a new phenomenon in New York City then. Bobby’d been telling me about a song his record company excluded from his first album, “Masters of War,” and at one point, jumped up on the stage to sing it. By this point we’d drunk ourselves into a reckless abandon. When Bobby got down from the stage and the regular show continued, his manager Albert Grossman, appeared and gave him a royal scolding. Grossman was struggling to get Bobby well-paid gigs and did not appreciate his spontaneous free performance. We drank and talked late into the night and started breakfast the next day, around noon, with wine. We agreed to keep in touch but later, when I wrote him a note from Florida, it came back: Addressee Unknown. I later learned he’d moved out of the Village to Woodstock.
Kennedy: When your One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding finally caught on in the US, following its success in Europe, that must have been wonderfully vindicating for you. Sudddenly you were a “star.”
Gover: The book caught on but I was still unknown. When I went to do one of my first book signings, I was told by the bookstore owner that I was not Robert Gover, that Robert Gover was a lanky black guy, a sharp dresser with a porkpie hat and had just dropped by and signed some books. I had to produce identification and call Grove Press to verify. I had purposely not sent Grove an author’s photo. I knew that using alternating first person viewpoints meant some readers were going to assume the story was autobiographical. I was trying to emphasize that I was neither the while boy nor the black girl in the story, that I made the whole thing up. The idea that a novelist could invest characters came as a shock to some literal thinkers.
Kennedy: In a recent book by Stephen Davis (Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend, 2004), I read about some of your exploits with Morrison. What you experienced in Las Vegas with Jim sounds pretty frightening.
Gover: I had not heard of Davis' book until you mentioned it. I’m out of the loop here in what is sometimes called “slower, lower Delaware.”
Kennedy: Me, too, in “little Denmark,” although it was a Danish bookseller who gave me the Davis book.
Gover: Davis scrambles some facts. The overall story is close enough but some of the specifics are off. We met in a restaurant in LA, not NY. I lived in a three-story house on the beach in Malibu, not an apartment. It had eight doors and we used to leave all eight unlocked – Jim liked to put in surprise appearances. Like we’d come in and find him sitting at my desk picking over whatever I’d be writing.
Kennedy: I heard a similar story about Brendan Behan and J. P. Donleavy. How Behan broke into Donleavy’s cottage when he was away, drank his liquor, ate his food and started editing the manuscript of Ginger Man, signing every page on which he made changes.
Gover: With Jim, we might wake up around 4:00 a.m. hearing a prowler – Jim raiding the refrigerator. Or I’d be upstairs at my typewriter and feel eyes on my back, turn and find him peeking over the decking of the upper balcony, having chinned himself to this position, hanging precariously by white-knuckled hands waiting for us to do something because there was a three-story fall to the beach below. Naturally whatever we’d planned for the day would be arrested by such a show-stopper as that so we’d usually light up a joint, go for a walk on the beach, cavort, talk.
And contrary to the Davis account, we did see each other after the trip to Vegas. Jim came to a party we threw in the Malibu house and lit up the guests by getting a blowjob in the moonlight on the deck just outside the big picture window. I did not include the blowjob in the article, and there are other things I left out because the point I wanted to make was that although Jim was wild he also had a load of talent and was a very brainy, philosophical, well-read guy.
The way I’d met Jim was that the New York Times Sunday Magazine editor called and asked if I’d do a story on the lead singer of The Doors, Jim Morrison. I jumped at the chance. “Light My Fire” was a radio hit at this time, and I was wowed by it. A luncheon with Jim and The Doors’ management was arranged. We sat around a huge round table in a Sunset Boulevard restaurant. The “suits” did all the talking. Jim sort of glowered from the far side of the table till we were on our way out, and he asked if I’d like to take a walk. Soon Jim was asking me how he could get a book of poems published. I invited him to brunch at my Malibu beach house the next day and he brought along a cute young groupie, and we loosened up and talked and I learned his version of The Doors’ history, and that they had just fired the management team I’d met the day before. The Times called to ask how the project was going and inform me that Jim was “a creation of his management.” I said that didn’t make sense, for he was an amazingly free spirit. They decided I’d been misinformed and took me off the assignment, but Jim kept coming out to the beach house and we had some long and memorable conversations late into the night about the nature of art and commerce. Perhaps our favorite topic was who really “owns” a work of art? The ones who “packaged” and got it out to the public? Or those who responded, absorbed it into their beings, “ate” it as a delicious aesthetic delicacy? What made Jim so special to me was that we could carry on such discussions with a bare minimum of words. But I always had to be on guard. One night he suddenly rushed the turntable, yanked the freshly released second Doors record off, smashed it to the floor and proceeded to stomp on it with his boots. I insisted he should destroy his copy of the album, not mine. That put us into a philosophical nuthouse for hours which we both thoroughly enjoyed.
My girlfriend Beverly Mitchell and I went to some Doors’ concerts as his guest, and we talked about combining on a screenplay of my novel, The Maniac Responsible (1963). Jim wanted to play the lead role and direct as well as co-author the script. At this time, Maniac had been optioned to a famous producer—-it would eventually be optioned numerous times without ever making it to the big silver screen. It got to be customary for Bev and I to wake up and find Jim asleep on our big leather livingroom couch, having devoured the contents of our fruit bowl sometime in the wee hours. I was about 15 years older than Jim, but my lesser literary fame was nothing compared to the pressure cooker his rockstar fame was fast becoming. Years later I wrote that article about how Jim and I got arrested in Las Vegas, the one Davis apparently got hold of. Sad to say, the last time I saw Jim he was miffed because I would not agree to go to Europe with The Doors and write a book about it—-I declined because I had to finish a novel I was working on. In retrospect I wish I’d dropped the novel and gone on the tour but Jim was a difficult, bipolar kind of guy to hang out with.
Kennedy: According to the account in the Davis book, you were both bailed out literally at the eleventh hour, just in time to avoid getting bashed by the night shift in the Vegas town jail.
Gover: Yes, Bev got us out just in the nick of time over Jim’s protests that he wanted to file charges for false arrest. I published a detailed account of that evening in the Santa Barbara News & Review on March 19th, 1981 – mainly to correct the misrepresented account in Jerry Hopkins’ and Danny Sugarman’s book about Jim, No One Here Gets Out Alive.
Kennedy: Speaking of Vegas, I cannot help but think of the great Hunter S. Thompson.
Gover: I first met Hunter Thompson while in Washington, DC, to write a piece about the antiwar movement for an underground newspaper, Art Kunkin’s LA Free Press.. A group of us “offbeat” journalists gathered at the home of Dan Greene, feature writer for the National Observer. We sat around Dan’s dining room table, laden with whiskey and pot. Hunter arrived late, and soon had us rolling on the floor with laughter as he described his taxi ride out of DC to Dan’s house in Bowie. At first, his description (“I had to rip open the bastard’s throat and gouge out his eyes”) was a bit unnerving, coming from this big guy who looked like a Nazi Storm Trooper in casual sports clothes. But we quickly realized that Hunter liked to embellish his tales by using blood and gore as hyperbolic metaphorical adjectives and adverbs. He then produced a bottle of ether and a box of poppers, explaining that you could buy these over the counter so there was no need to indulge in such illegal substances as marijuana.
The last time I saw Hunter, he’d called repeatedly the afternoon I was packing up a houseful of furniture to move, saying he was with the Malibu Sheriff’s Department and was coming to investigate. He arrived around 2 a.m. with his entourage, including his famous Gonzo lawyer buddy. I’d been asleep about an hour, snug with wife and new baby son, when the lights went on and here’s Hunter yanking my arm, telling me I had to get up and party. I couldn’t keep my eyes open long enough to remember when they all left, but the next evening we did gather around the pool of a motel on Pacific Coast Highway--Hunter, his Gonzo guy and me. The motel management woke me the next day with the news that our littering of the pool area was not appreciated. Hunter and Gonzo were gone, and I did not hear from him till years later, when he called from his lair in the Colorado mountains to discuss the fine points of paranoia.
Kennedy: You mention having met Raymond Carver?
Gover: I met Ray Carver at the home of Noel Young, publisher of Capra Books in Santa Barbara in 1973. He and his wife Judy had a brunch one Sunday morning for half a dozen of Capra’s writers. I recall speaking with Carver, although not precisely what we said. I'd read a book of his short stories and could see that he was very talented, an original. We acknowledged appreciating each other's work The “headliner” that day was a guy Kerouac wrote about in On the Road, Allen Watts, Zen philosopher. He did hatha yoga exercises on the kitchen bar. I had a more in-depth conversation with him. I had a hard time recalling his name just now because later that night, a couple of girls who liked to notch their belts with famous names balled him, even though they said he was "reluctant," and shortly after that he died of a heart attack. Santa Barbara was that kind of town, hot, money lush, casual and deadly.
Kennedy: Who else did you get to know around that time, of the writers who helped make it possible for people to come out from the shadow of the censor?
Gover: The editors at Grove Press introduced me to a number of their authors but the writers I saw the most of were Native American novelist Hyemeyohsts (Chuck) Storm, Lennox and Maryanne Raphael (whose book about their interracial marriage, Garden of Hope, is due out this year), Walter Bowart (author of the CIA-banned book, Mind Control) and novelist and poet Ishmael Reed, who pioneered the East Village Other with Walt Bowart.
In 1964 Lennox and Maryanne were a spectacular “mixed” couple, he from Trinidad, she from Ohio, and both bright with promise. It was hard to believe that Maryanne had won the Sorbonne’s first prize for a novel in French written by a foreign student, for she was built like a ballerina and glamorous as a magazine model. Lennox wrote an off-Broadway play, Che, in which the President of the US and Che Guevara dialogue in the Oval Office, in the nude, moderated by a nun, The Sister of Mercy. The President speaks in advertising slogans, Che in political slogans. Lennox was arrested and tried for obscenity. He now lives in your city by the way, Copenhagen.
Lennox, Ishmael, Walt Bowart and I spent a memorable Sunday afternoon at the home of poet Walter Lowenfels, who’d shared a prize with e. e. cummings but had been dumped by the literary establishment because he’d taken a job with the Daily Worker, a communist newspaper. He’d been raided by an FBI swat teach in the wee hours, during which his wife Lillian suffered a stroke that paralyzed her right side. Walter’s neighbor Pete Seeger came by and played some of his songs, and I hatched the idea to do an anthology of Lowenfels’ works. With his stories from the 1930s and 1940s, Lowenfels was a literary father figure to many during The Sixties.
Ish Reed and I shared an interest in Voodoo (which he liked to call hoodoo and spell a variety of ways).
Kennedy: You wrote a nonfiction book about voodoo – Voodoo Contra: Contradictory Meanings of the Word.
Gover: Yes, the word means “creator of the universe” or “energy that permeates the universe” in the original African tongue. One day while walking down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, talking voodoo, Ish and I heard something that stopped us cold: the first sounds of the first album made by Dr. John of New Orleans, resurrecting old New Orleans voodoo. We rushed into the record store and each bought a copy and tried to figure whether Dr. John was black or white. At the time, Ish was living in an unfurnished apartment, having upgraded from East Village slum to a teaching job at UC Berkeley. He was teaching a course in black consciousness in American literature and invited me to put in a guest appearance, which got him in trouble with the department head because my skin is white. I had lunch with him and his wife, Carla Blank, in 2000, not long after he’d won what is called the McArthur Genius Award.
Walt Bowart resurfaced in my life during the 1980s when we met at a writers conference in Monterey, and we hashed over The Sixties when the astounding happened so often it seemed commonplace. We congratulated each other for surviving those wild times and talked about becoming better adjusted to these more restrained times. Walt was making ends meet as editor of Palm Springs Magazine. I had just gotten together with Carolyn, now my wife of 20 years. Walt and I decided to take a trip down to Cochise country, the mountains of southeastern Arizona where he owned a piece of canyon-laced land, upon which we fantasized we might build something commercially viable. We drove down there in Walt’s SUV, leaving my car with his girlfriend Becky, and when we got back to his house near Palm Springs, we found that she had wrecked my Maxima by hotrodding it offroad, a kind of belated punctuation point to The Sixties.
Kennedy: I cannot help but think our paths must have crossed a time or two back then, although I was hopelessly unplugged in, a bewildered spectator, trying to learn to write, while practicing the art of hitchhiking and keeping out of jail.
Gover: I was bewildered too during The Sixties and often felt out of it. It’s likely that our paths did cross. I was about 10 years older than most of the activists I met but did not look my age so "passed" most of the time. In fact, the momentous events of those times were such that, when I went to the '68 Democratic Convention street protests in Chicago, I decided to bring a movie camera in addition to scribbling notes. I bought an 8 mm Beaului (sp?) with a zoom lens and promptly found it was useless at night, and a hazard because Chicago policemen were ordered to whack cameras. I have a clear memory of seeing out of the corner of my eye a cop moving toward me with his club raised. I dodged the movie camera just in time, then run with the cop hot on my heels. I put together a half hour documentary and showed it to a film producer named Bob Story who promptly turned it over to government people who didn't return it to me for months and only after I signed some kind of statement promising not to distribute it commercially. I made two copies. One was stolen from my house in Santa Barbara, the other years later from an apartment in Penns Grove, NJ, where I lived briefly. This was the mid-1980s when I was betwixt and between, going through a variety of difficulties, and struggling to keep body and soul together. As a shorthand explanation, I sometimes tell people I stayed too long at the party of the sixties, but that is an oversimplification.
Kennedy: You mentioned attending the Doors’ concerts. That must have been fantastic, especially being backstage, although I confess concerts give me earaches.
Gover: I was not a big rock concert fan and was mostly interested in Morrison's talent and The Doors as a phenomenon. Going to rock concerts gave me a headache and I fled when I could, or avoided going. On the other hand, impromptu gatherings fascinated me, especially when they were in parks where various speakers would take a bullhorn and deliver various political opinions or commentaries on the whole general movement of society at the time. I had the sense that I was witnessing a tremendous change, that the country would never be the same, that the various movements of the sixties were revolutionary, and when the dust settled around the mid-1970s, I was left feeling somewhat disoriented. Not only from dashed expectations but also from drugs and booze and too much promiscuous sex. I had also made some very wrong decisions and sort of woke up to find that what I thought would be enough money to last me a lifetime had been blown away by a couple of drug-laced decisions and the long lingering illness of my oldest son when he was between 1 and 2 years old. In brief, I came out of the sixties a wreck.
Kennedy: Who else from the sixties impressed you? Who were the most impressive?
Gover; Well, two people of note were certainly Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. I attended the last House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) Hearing when their "street theater" antics turned that anti-democratic ritual into a farce. I was amazed, delighted and fascinated in October 1967 by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and their merry band of pranksters, bent on an absolutely whacko project: “to levitate the Pentagon.” No one believed this was possible of course yet everyone found a role to play in this magnificent spoof. I flew East for the occasion and my friend Dan Greene introduced me to Abbie and the night before the big event we spent some hours walking the streets of downtown Washington, DC. Abbie led us into a sandwich shop for a bite to eat and by the time we left he had everyone there either confounded, collapsed in laughter or both.
Top Pentagon officials, who directed the mightiest military the world had ever known, were totally undone by Hoffman, Rubin and the estimated 50,000 demonstrators they brought together for the ha-ha levitation. The media turned out in force. Helicopters prowled overhead. Soldiers surrounded the Pentagon, faces frozen in deadly determination. Police cars zoomed back and forth on surrounding streets as throngs of people—-many dressed in mythical costumes (witches, warlocks, voodoo priests, gremlins, Roman gladiators, etc.)—-moved toward the Pentagon’s front entrance, having been prevented from surrounding it. The atmosphere was electric with slapstick magic.
Out of this day “Flower Power” was born, and the comedy was ordered continued by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which called before its glowering members Abbie, Jerry and assorted other leaders of the antiwar movement. Jerry Rubin donned a Revolutionary soldier uniform for his appearance, and on another day carried a toy M1 rifle that frightened the guards, till they leaped upon and captured him, and discovered they’d been had.
I think it was on the second day of the hearing that Abbie pulled his most memorable spoof. He put on a USA flag shirt and left the hotel, crossed the street toward the entrance to the building where the hearing was being held, and was immediately assaulted by half a dozen cops, who tore that flag shirt off only to discover that he’d painted a Vietnamese flag on his back. They then grabbed him and strong-armed him down the side street, where a black police van was parked. They locked him in the van and were then distracted by demonstrators across the street, heckling them. During this distraction, a longhaired hippie type sneaked up to the police van and, circling it on his haunches, let the air out of each tire. So when the police turned back to their primary duty, they could not drive the van and had to call for backup.
Abbie’s lawyer, William Kuntsler, had him out of jail and back at the HUAC hearing by noon, as I recall, where he continued to work his slapstick witchcraft on those Kafkaesque interrogators, causing their power to disintegrate right before our eyes. How in the world could they deal with this Yankee Doodle clown, who worked a no-man’s land between crime and comedy? Who had, not long before “the levitation of the Pentagon,” rained down money on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, causing another pandemonium. Is throwing money at stockbrokers illegal? It seems no one was ever sure how much money Abbie and co. had thrown at the brokers, or even if their money had been US Treasury Notes or monopoly game currency. It didn’t matter. The act was worth a zillion words.
Abbie was an amazing genius, able to transform volumes of debate into one comedy act that sunk such institutions of oppression as HUAC in a single burst of laughter.
Kennedy: He was one of the Chicago 8, too, wasn’t he?
Gover: Yes, Abbie was one of the Chicago 8, or 7, after the judge muzzled Bobby Seale and then threw him in prison for 4 years for contempt. It's getting arrested for the flag shirt and then Vietnamese flag painted on his back, the police van sabotage, that I remember best. I caught that sequence with my trusty 8 mm movie camera. A sign of these times is that it's very difficult to find online any account of his appearance before HUAC. Seems that's been censored Soviet-style out of existence except for a piece written as a thesis by an LSU student of the performing arts. The censors missed that one.
I also caught with my movie camera live televised images of tanks rolling through the streets of Chicago summer of '68 pushing a wall of barbed wire, mowing down demonstrators. Those images have also been destroyed or hidden, for they are not shown in contemporary documentaries about that event. Which is another reason I mourn the loss of that little documentary I made.
I have read some books about the sixties and they have mostly been about headline people and events, whereas my own personal experience of the sixties--my keenest memories--are of not-so-famous people and places and events. I joined an NAACP chapter in Gifford, Florida, and wrote a novella based on the happenings there, which my agent at this time, Scott Meredith, disappeared without a trace, saying he knew nothing about it, when I'd given him the rough copy at his request and he'd promised to have it typed up and returned to me for further work. It seems Scott Meredith (his business name) believed that novella would destroy my reputation because at the time I was viewed as a "comic writer" and this novella got into some unpublicized horrors of the racial situation.
Kennedy: Racism and xenophobia is on the rise in Europe these days, even in the Netherlands and Denmark, where 13% of the people have voted for a party that pushes decidedly xenophobic policies and does so rather successfully, working hand in glove with the majority party. Have you been to Europe recently?
Gover: I've been hearing about the rise of racism in Europe. My first thought is that xenophobia is a universal human affliction. My second thought is that this most recent outburst is happening during an opposition of Saturn and Neptune (structures threatened by erosion), and in the US there is a huge upsurge against the importation of cheap labor from south of the border, which of course has racist overtones as well as economic ramifications. As long as people are fighting each other, the wealthiest 1% is protected from criticism, protecting the economic status quo that grinds down the poor. I hear the American soccer team has to move about Germany quietly, for there are many there who would like to express their anger at Bush by bashing the team. It seems we are into another season of xenophobia and I suspect it will get worse before it abates. Inside the USA now, there is nastiness between Democrats and Republicans, and between a growing number of the population against Congress and other branches of government because it's glaringly obvious they are selling the people out to the big corporations. The way I see it, the atmosphere is very much like it was during the years leading up to the American Revolutionary War, when Pluto was last where it is now. My hope is that the media machine that manipulates public opinion will break down or be revealed for what it is and people will come out of this period ready to make democratic improvements.
I went to Amsterdam May-June 2005 to give a couple of lectures at the International Society of Business Astrologers convention, then visited Lennox and Helga and Papaya in Copenhagen and then showed my wife Carolyn Paris. I hadn't been to Europe since 1970 and it had changed tremendously. Back in 1969 I was given a tour of Paris by a gal who'd been involved in the student uprising and that was an eye-opener. There were soldiers on the main street corners then and Parisians were in a surly mood, especially toward Americans, but on this last visit, the mood was cheerful and my wife and I were treated wonderfully well.
Amsterdam seemed especially upbeat, the people healthy and happy. The Danes aren't exactly as outgoing as the Dutch but they seemed in great shape too. As did the French and Germans. I admire the French—-when their government threatens to pass laws detrimental to the general wellbeing, they strike en mass and shut down the country till the government relents. I would like to have gotten to Spain and seen the changes there, for I'd lived in Majorca during the last days of the Franco regime.
Kennedy: Can you tell something about that?
Gover: Well, I had a 3-book contract with Pocket Books which then merged with Simon and Schuster and my editor, Herb Alexander, was handed his head by the new boss of S&S who then promptly canceled the 50,000 hardback first printing of my novel Poorboy at the Party--even though it was featured on the cover of Publishers Weekly that week. Review copies had already gone out so he sent out notice to not review, that the book had been canceled. He eventually changed “canceled” to “postponed” and brought out an edition of 5,000 copies and then told me the book didn't sell! He killed it. Later he canceled my contract and when I said, "Hey, that's illegal," he smiled and said, "So sue." My agent, Scott Meredith, let me know that suing was not a viable option--it would cost millions that I did not have and the publisher had my life insured for $8M via a Canadian company. Scott advised I make myself scarce. Not long after that, I moved my wife and our newborn to Spain, Majorca, where the Guardia Civil was stationed every night at the head of the only road down to our place, an apartment in what had been an ancient watchtower. We took trips to various other places in Europe from Palma de Majorca, busiest airport in the world at that time, it was said. When we first landed there, we were surrounded by soldiers with assault weapons pointed at me. I was told not to be afraid, they were just trying to be good allies of the US. They confiscated my typewriter, tape recorder, camera and a movie camera. They soon gave me back all but the movie camera. It wasn't returned for several months. Then, just when I was thinking what a mistake I'd made choosing Spain, a reporter and photographer from the Balearic newspaper showed up to do a most flattering interview and photo, even though OHDM was banned in Spain then. So we settled into the apartment in Deya and made the best of it.
Kennedy: Did you have contact with other writers there?
Gover: Robert Graves was our neighbor. He and I used to meet each other taking walks, and occasionally we'd stop and chat, small talk. One early winter morning I went down the stairs to go out the front door and around into the stable under the apartment to get fire wood and was blinded by bright lights, which turned out to be those of a German TV crew filming Graves standing by my front door. They explained that it looked more like a place a writer would live than his more upscale home. Graves and I had a laugh about it, but the German director was on a tight budget and miffed. Graves joked that maybe they should shoot us chatting by my door, but I was wearing one of those heavy Arab pullovers against the cold, and he was nattily dressed with his huge-brimmed hat, and I had nothing to do with the story they were shooting. I got the firewood and watched the filming from my bedroom window.
We made friends in Majorca with the Blau's, who were ordered out of the country ostensibly because Mrs. Blau wore mini skirts to the market each day, where she shopped with the locals. They were busted, their mail shut off, so we paid their way out, and we all flew to Copenhagen where he had a possible job waiting for him, teaching. He was a "radical rabbi." I was very sick when we arrived in Copenhagen. The water in our tank in Majorca had been poisoned by a rat who'd taken the poison our landlord had set out, then crawled up into the water tank and died, and I had brushed my teeth with this water and become very ill. When we got to our hotel in Copenhagen, the desk clerk called a doctor who almost beat us to our room and then saw me through a rough illness, visiting daily. When I wanted to pay him something, if only a tip, he put up his hand and made a face. So Copenhagen has a special place in my heart, for I don't know what would have become of me if I'd collapsed in Spain at that time.
Kennedy: You’ve written a book about economic astrology and I have the impression you are a serious astrologer. How have readers responded to that?
Gover: I wish I had what it takes to make economic astrology an entertaining read. But it's a brain-strain. It's outside our usual frames of reference and most well educated people have been convinced it's superstitious nonsense, although they haven’t studied it or looked at the evidence. Those who have studied it--like one of the lecturers at Amsterdam who teaches physics at the U. of Moscow--have gone through major changes of mind. But because it combines mathematically precise astronomy with ancient pantheistic mythology to explain the findings, it is "neither fish nor foul," so most modern, rational intellectuals can dismiss it as “unscientific.” Each moment in cosmic time is unique—-the planets of our solar system are never arranged exactly the same way twice—-so scientific duplicating is not possible. Yet there are definite correlations between planetary and economic cycles, which help explain how history repeats but does not duplicate.
Well, I seem condemned to explore these "outside the lines" kind of things: miscegenation, voodoo, and astrology as the most ancient and enduring way to predict future economic conditions. It doesn’t make a lot of money but it keeps the brain cells dancing.
Kennedy: What are your plans for the future--more fiction? I hear you have a novel coming out soon.
Gover: The novel was written in 1990. I didn't think it was worth taking to NY because I had listened to editors there scoff at "old has-been's" coming to town with new books they'd just written. So I just put it in the proverbial trunk and didn't haul it out till earlier this year when novelist Christopher Klim asked to look at it and brought it to Hopewell Publications. It's titled On the Run with Dick and Jane, she being a 12-year-old runaway, he being a 63-year-old retiree recently widowed and not yet able to get SS and Medicare, and the illness of his late wife Mae has cost him two houses and his pension nest egg, and he still owes a pile of medical bills. Jane, it develops, is being pursued by "good church-go'ers" who have already pre-sold her to an Asian prostitution ring, and they are determined to retrieve her. I see their situations as symptoms of the disintegration of what once promised to become the best society on Earth.
Right now I am at a crossroads, it seems. In years past I made either too much or too little to pay into the Social Security fund, except for the years just out of Pitt when I worked as a journalist. I just sent off a query to Mother Jones Magazine to do an article about Iraq's switch from dollars to euros to sell oil back in November 2000, and persistent rumors that Iran is building a bourse to do the same. Protecting the dollar, it seems, is the hidden reason behind Bush and co.'s aggressions toward both those countries. “Whoever controls the money, controls the world.” If Mother Jones wants this article, I will probably do more along this line. I have in mind one that would explore the power of public relations to shape public opinion to the will of the oligarchy that now owns and operates the US and other governments. My premise is that we are now on the cusp of either a new Dark Age or a revolution that will refine democracy and catapult us into a better world circa 2020. I see the contending forces as democracy versus the global corporate oligarchy.
You yourself, Tom, have done an amazing body of work. And neither of us are "the chosen" by the guys who run the US media corporations which own and control the marketing infrastructure for books, movies, news shows, entertainment, etc. It took me some years to realize there is an upside to being on the outs with them. We don't have to try to conform to their wishes and expectations, which leaves us free to explore subjects and situations we would probably avoid if we were among their "stars." Years ago, a publishing house executive called me a genius, and when I wondered out loud about that, since I had not proven myself yet, he let me know it was because of how much money one of my novels made. So if you make money for the merchant princes of today, you’re called a genius, and if you don’t, you’re called a failure. But this can’t last, the only constant is change.
Email: tek@adslhome.dk
Telephone: (+45) 3542 4290 or 2032 2963
© Copyright 2006
(6,890 words)
A CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT GOVER
By Thomas E. Kennedy
On the occasion of the republication of Gover’s One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding (Hopewell Publications, Titusville, New Jersey, 2005,
225 pages, $15.95)
