Robert Gover made a difference for a generation and for generations to follow.
\nPresentation to the Conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Chicago, March 2nd, 2012<\/em><\/p>\n

R<\/span>obert Gover is a genuine hero of American letters, and his One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding is a classic of the literature of social change that flourished in the mid to late 20th century. It is a book that has made a difference \u2013 and considering how our country is developing (is there a word for counter-developing?) that difference and those changes might very well be needed again.<\/p>\n

About three weeks ago, I finished reading that novel for the fourth or fifth time. The first time was about fifty years ago when it was first published in the United States. And I am pleased to say that it holds up. It more than holds up. It is still belly-laugh funny and beautiful and insightful and exciting \u2013 it is comic and sexy and absurd and right-on accurate about these absurdities of American life. And it is as modern as when it was written even if we do have an African-American president now.<\/p>\n

In 1962 \u2013 the year that Robert Gover\u2019s One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding was published in the U.S. \u2013 I was drafted into the U.S. Army for a term of two years. Lucky for me. The U.S. was quietly getting ready to make war in Vietnam, but at the time that I was drafted, it was still the peacetime Army and would continue to be, at least in name, until November 1965 with Landing Zone X-Ray, the first official battle of the Vietnam war, by which time I was long back into my civvies.<\/p>\n

Of course, I hated the army, but as the Danes say, Nothing is so bad that it is not good for something. My tour in the army, especially during basic training \u2013 the first eight weeks of my service, which seemed like eight years – -was the first time in my life I had ever lived with African-Americans.<\/p>\n

In fact, the population of my Fort Dix, New Jersy basic training barracks was about forty percent black. Even nearly a century after the American Civil War, a black person in the United States could not get a fair deal \u2013 one of the jobs open to him or her was as a soldier.<\/p>\n

So I shared barracks with Clyde T. Washington and Noble Timmins, Jr., Donald Thomas and Tyrone Thomas, Alfred R. Stroman, Richard A. Selby, Ivan L. Smith, and Tyrone McGraw, Sleepy Wayne Harrison, and Slim Hubbard, who\u2019d been in the golden gloves in Phillie, Leon Johnson and Reginald Johnson and William Johnson (known as \u201cJohnson, L\u201d and \u201cJohnson, R.\u201d and \u201cJohnson, W.\u201d). There was also the cadre \u2013 Sergeant First Class McCutcheon, Staff Sergeant Alexander King and Corporal Tuckson, who used to march us to breakfast before sunrise those freezing dark New Jersey mornings, counting cadence to Huey Piano Smith and the Clowns \u2013 \u201cDon\u2019t You Just Know It\u201d and \u201cI Got the Rockin\u2019 Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.\u201d This was cadence like it had never been counted before.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not reciting all those names to kill time, but those names to me are a kind of litany, celebrating when my white butt was freed from the racial boundary in the land of the free. Those were the days, of course, that segregation still existed in the U.S., south and north. There was apartheid, and if I am grateful to the Army for one thing, it is that it made it possible for me, for the first time in my life, to have black friends. And to my surprise they seemed just as curious about me, most of them \u2013 a skinny, big-nosed curious friendly ofay who looked something like a cross between Buddy Holly and Woodie Allen.<\/p>\n

That year or maybe a year later, I happened to pick up a novel by Robert Gover entitled One Hundred DollarMisunderstanding, and that book put the words to the situation which would laugh racism right out of the mainstream. It would take some years \u2013 some very hard years \u2013 and a lot of pain \u2013 it was as Langston Hughes put it, \u201claughing to keep from crying\u201d \u2013 but Gover\u2019s book was an advance standard bearer, and it came from the heart more than from the brain, but the heart-felt passion of it \u2013 of young smart Kitten and clunky white middle class racist liberal J.C. Holland \u2013 ran on first-rate intelligence.<\/p>\n

I realized, reading that novel, that if my parents hadn\u2019t been who they were, if my father, anytime he heard some disparaging racial slur had not been quick to say, \u201cNegroes are just like us. They just want to do what they can for their families.\u201d If he hadn\u2019t made that point repeatedly, growing up as I did in a redneck northern neighborhood, I might have turned into a character like J. C. Holland, as ignorant a racist college-educated sonuvabitch as ever breathed.<\/p>\n

When I read Robert Gover\u2019s One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, I felt pretty much the way I felt when I saw Kubrick and Terry Southern\u2019s Dr. Strangelove or when I read Henry Miller or Terry Southern or Joseph Heller or Warren Miller or listened to Bob Dylan \u2013 in short, I felt filled with delight, liberated with laughter or recognition as all the mind manacles fell off \u2013 as the cell doors of hypocrisy popped open \u2013 the racist ones, the jingoistic ones, the anti-sexual ones, the linguistic ones, the American terror of socialism, the insanity that had our world divided into black and white and east and west with nuclear missiles aimed every which way.<\/p>\n

Of course, everybody heard what Robert Gover was saying, and it was ripe to be said. Henry Miller heard him and Herbert Gold did, Gore Vidal and Joseph Heller did and Jim Morrisson and Hunter S. Thompson did. Even goddamn Time magazine heard him! A whole generation heard him.<\/p>\n

And me, in the midst of redneck Queens, I heard him, too. I remember reading that book, and my brain and my heart opening like a flower.<\/p>\n

Robert Gover is fifteen years my senior, and I never imagined at 18 or 19 that I would have the privilege to actually meet the man one day. As Holden Caulfield says, When you finish a really good book, you just want to call the author up and ask him a lot of questions. Well a little more than 40 years later, I got to do just that, and Robert and I had one helluva conversation \u2013 we had a 6,345 word conversation which was published in The Literary Review in 2007.<\/p>\n

And what is the misunderstanding at the heart of Gover\u2019s novel? It is about a hundred dollars, of course \u2013 four twenties and two tens \u2013 because in his extremely ignorant vanity, the 19-year-old middle-class, white, racist, so-called liberal college boy, J. C. Holland, thinks he shouldn\u2019t have to \u201cpay for it,\u201d whereas Kitten, in her 14-year-old wisdom wants her hundred dollars for the weekend of pleasure she has given J.C. \u2013 \u201cYou got some o\u2019 me and I got some o\u2019 you.\u201d (page 202)<\/p>\n

But it is also a misunderstanding between races, between social classes, between men and women, between kinds of intelligence, spheres of American behavior, a misunderstanding of words and language and syntax. J. C. Holland tries \u201cto explain (to Kitten) the difference between normal marital sexual relations and abnormal perverted illegal immorality.\u201d (p. 140)<\/p>\n

When Kitten is learning to read, she comes \u201ct\u2019this one big word mean fuck.\u201d Her teacher says it is pronounced \u201cCOP YOU LATE,\u201d and Kitten asks, \u201cit mean fuck, how come it don\u2019 jus\u2019 say fuck.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Kitten is told the word fuck is bad, but Kitten cannot understand how a word can be bad, so she is informed \u201cCOP YOU LATE\u201d is \u201clike White, an- fuck is like Black\u2026 COP YOU LATE got loot, an\u2019 fuck is down an\u2019 out broke.\u201d (page 197)<\/p>\n

This is, in fact, at a time when the word \u201cfuck\u201d could land you in jail \u2013 as Lenor Kandel learned in San Francisco when she published the poem, \u201cTo Fuck with Love,\u201d or as Lenny Bruce learned when he stood up in public and said the word. It was a time when University of California at Berkeley students were going around with signs around their necks on which was printed, \u201cFuck, Verb.\u201d It was a time that kids \u2013 like me \u2013 had one language they used in the streets and another language they used at home and in school, a language cauterized of the poetry of sex, a proper language, and you didn\u2019t really question that there were two sets of words and two kinds of behavior \u2013 one that included sex and one that did not include sex \u2013 until somebody stood up and started seizing back our right to speak what we wish to, what the bill of rights guarantees us the right to.<\/p>\n

So this was the atmosphere in which Robert Gover created Kitten, and Kitten\u2019s intelligence is such that she questions. She asks why. Whereas J. C. Holland buys all the hypocrisy about \u201cobscenity\u201d and the space race, the arms race, and racism.<\/p>\n

Kitten, listening in on the TV news with J. C. Holland (pp 111 and 121), points out that it is insane that a man has been pronounced sane and therefore qualifies to be submitted to the insanity of execution. Kitten asks her question that nobody seems to want to ask — about that, about everything \u2013 \u201cHow come they wanna do that for?\u201d<\/p>\n

Kitten\u2019s intelligence is such that it dares venture where J.C.\u2019s won\u2019t or can\u2019t \u2013 questioning the mad affairs of state and international politics, whereas J.C. blindly accepts the status quo. Further the language of Kitten is rhythmic and musical and from the body:<\/p>\n

\u201cHe so fishfry flush he kin hardly get his mothahumpin\u2019 hands roun\u2019 that wad!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI jes dee-diddly-dam well know him!\u201d (p. 40)<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then he axin\u2019 bout roun\u2019 the worl\u2019? An\u2019 alla time so jimjam jittery he ain\u2019 gonna make it t\u2019the corner.\u201d (p. 41)<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026rump-thumpin\u2019 knucklehead dumb\u2026\u201d (p. 133)<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026he wrinkle up one minit and he snort the next\u2026\u201d (p. 136)<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026he do more o\u2019his dum rantin\u2019 and ravin\u2019 and big-word noise\u2026\u201d (p. 136)<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026he pop and hop and go runnin\u2019 roun\u2019 like he \u2018bout t\u2019fly\u2026\u201d (p. 87)<\/p>\n

The poetry J. C. Holland has to offer in return is as limited as his world view and out of touch with the rhythms and functions of his body: \u201cBy gosh,\u201d he says, and \u201cHoly Christmas,\u201d and \u201cHa ha,\u201d and \u201cfor crying out loud,\u201d and \u201dfor gosh sakes,\u201d and \u201cgood gracious,\u201d and \u201cwhat the heck!\u201d and \u201crear end.\u201d \u201cPrick yourself, you may be dreaming,\u201d and \u201cTruth is stranger than fiction.\u201d But aware of his linguistic short-comings, he says, \u201cI wish I were a paid professional writer so I could describe it to you.\u201d And he says, \u201cThat girl was not bad-looking for a non-white,\u201d then he is quick to assure the reader that he himself is \u201cfar from a prejudiced white person\u201d and that his foray into a non-white ill repute house\u201d is purely \u201ceducational and sociological.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trick of a good trapeze act is it has to look easy. One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding \u2013 like the best of acrobatics \u2013 looks easy, it reads easy, it makes you smile, it makes you laugh out loud. But I make no mistake when I say that it didn\u2019t come easy because it took courage to go up against the tide. And Robert Gover documents that \u2013 in his introduction to Hopewell\u2019s edition of the book \u2013 and praise to Christopher Klim for helping make this possible. In that introduction, Robert Gover tells about how much against the tide he was.<\/p>\n

We were still marches away from the dissolution of segregation, marches and assassinations. It takes courage to stand up and make a statement like One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding at a time like that. In fact, it still takes courage in the United States of today.<\/p>\n

Praise to one hell of a courageous man and writer: Robert Gover.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/p>\n

One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, Robert Gover. Titusville, N.J.: Hopewell Publications, 2005. New York: Grove Press, 1962.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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