A Review of David Kherdian’s Gatherings: Select and Uncollected Writings

David Kherdian came of age as a writer when small presses and journals — City Lights, Evergreen Review, Origin, Ark II/Moby I — were ripping to pieces the whole literary fabric. It was San Francisco, 1960, five years after Ginsberg’s Howl, a terrific time to be a poet if changing the world is what you were going for. Writing was at its reddest hot, a blast of the mystic imagination before it began its sad descent into obscurity. Am I the only one who wonders how in one generation we went from lions roaring from the hilltops to pasty-faced nerds reading in lecture halls? Anyway, what held the Beats together was a belief that through poetry humans could attain a consciousness that was equal to the universe that it was seated in. Their common cause was supreme faith in a way of being that was open to infinite and radical possibilities.

Kherdian comes into that world, at the age of 28, with two years of army under his belt, and having just graduated from college. In San Francisco he takes a room in an apartment on Beaver Street, newly vacated by the poet Lew Welch. He shares a kitchen with Philip Whalen, and in no time the whole cast of characters drops by: Ginsberg and Orlofsky, and Snyder, McClure, Meltzer, and all the rest. There was jazz, and there was poetry, and there was Rexroth’s inspired concoction, “jazz-poetry”; there was a lot of cheap wine, and probably very satisfactory sex.  Dive bars, little coffee houses, and eateries with names like the Co-existence Bagel House is where they all hung out. He tells us about it in one of three delicious pieces included in a section titled “The Beats, The San Francisco Renaissance, and the 60’s.”

That is one of eleven sections ranging in theme from “William Saroyan” to “The Gurdjieff Work,” to a section devoted to his masterpiece, The Road From Home. They are made up of interviews, lectures, forewords, reviews, as well as poems and short stories — a terrific fun-house of a read that also smartly charts his fifty-year writing life, the archetypal artistic journey from chaos to clarity, from unconsciousness to consciousness, from the raw burning desire to be heard to the quiet mastery of a craft.

It was a long, lonely road, especially at the beginning, because Kherdian had nobody to show him how and no books around to even give him a lead. His parents, genocide survivors, were too busy cobbling together a life while trying to put behind them the burden of their personal and historic loss as best they could. David was too sensitive a kid not to absorb it, but at the same time he was too alive to stew in it.  There was much to discover in the small town he was given: Racine, Wisconsin. The little rituals of daily life, the home-grown characters, the factories that men labored in, and the abandoned ones the boys haunted, and the twists and turns of the river — they call it Root — that ran through the town, all of it kept him on the go. And it was on the shores of Lake Michigan where he fished with pious regularity that Kherdian found his religion. The lake — its eddies and currents, running deep and dark, the fights-to-the-death it contained, the living treasures, that with patience and a little cunning, it was prepared to yield — would eventually come to mirror Kherdian’s understanding of the human soul, one that he would spend a lifetime fishing and fathoming with words.

He left Frisco at just about the time that the Hippies were invading the city. He’s driving with Richard Brautigan down from North Beach and when they hit the corner of Haight and Ashbury, his buddy sums it up: “It’s all teenage slum now.” If he left Racine to breathe in new and big ideas, he left Frisco because the air had become polluted. Though he doesn’t come out and say it in Gatherings, that’s the sense I had. I also had the sense that Kherdian was too old a soul, too vigorous and yeoman-like, still too Armenian, really, to just “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” But he also left to find a mentor, and the one he’d always dreamed of was living in Fresno, only a few hours down the road.

He’d already put together the first and still the only bibliography of William Saroyan, when he showed up at the master’s door. Saroyan needed a secretary, someone to organize his papers. The timing was perfect, but when Kherdian showed him a batch of poems he’d written, Saroyan sent him home: anyone who had that kind of promise as a writer needed to be managing his own literary affairs. Saroyan lost his paper-pusher, and Kherdian got his mentor.

The earliest piece in this book titled, “Poetry and the Little Press,” is from 1969. It makes clear that from the start Kherdian was intent on writing in a voice that was inviting — natural, easygoing, and playful. Throughout this book, and no matter the format or genre, we find him putting down sentence after lovely sentence with generosity, and yet unshakeable conviction. It is precisely like having a conversation with a first-rate friend, one that has your best interests in mind but isn’t afraid to piss you off, and also one that dares to swerve at critical intervals into what it all means, the big, and then bigger picture. If Kherdian seems to lack a signature style, one can be sure, after reading Gatherings for a stretch, that it is his eschewing of writing that calls too much attention to itself that is, in fact, his style.

Kherdian seems to believe in literature too much to let something like his own ego take charge, yet, in saying that, I’m courting a certain irony because a great deal of Kherdian’s writing amounts to meditations and reflections on his own life. But a little longer look at the body of his work and it all falls into place: Kherdian believes that literature exists to reveal and redeem what lies buried, hidden, in ignorance, vanity, or shame — even or especially when the object of discovery is one’s self.

“But for art,” he writes in “NASSR talk,” “we cannot see ourselves, we cannot know who we were or are. We are, finally, our stories, because without these stories we would not exist.” That’s one helluva statement, amounting to a kind of grand, unified theory, and has to explain his pioneering of a number of trends in writing that we now take for granted. He put together one of the earliest books, and taught the very first college course ever, on the Beats; with Down at the Santa Fe Depot, a collection of work from the Fresno poets, he made the case that regional writing had its own rhythm and sensibility. He started Forkroads, a journal devoted to “multi-cultural writing” when people shook their heads at what something like that might look like. His ideas were ahead of the curve, but his execution of them was straightforward and workmanlike.

To my mind, these attributes of Kherdian come to their greatest fruition in Forgotten Bread: First Generation Armenian-American Writers. He ends Gatherings with his introduction for that book, and lectures and addresses he gave inaugurating its publication. That he should have taken on this monumental task in his mid-seventies not only speaks to his insane energy level, but also points to his belief in the value of literature to change the terms of the game. We discover in Gatherings that in 1971, for his first issue as editor of Ararat, he wrote, “I do not want to be the custodian of a declining church, resurrector for a lost art, or mourn for the massacred millions. We live in that we have a future … ” (Needless to say, Kherdian never played the paree deghah [good boy] waiting for his plate of borag.). Unbeknownst to most of us, that future was already being forged by Armenian-American writers whose work was mostly lost to time.  With an introductory essay by second-generation Armenian Americans on first-generation writers, Forgotten Bread is a 500-page testament to our people’s literary genius.

The hundreds of thousands of Armenians living in the Los Angeles area alone should’ve gobbled up the first printing in a matter of days. But this monumental masterpiece, handsomely designed, intelligently conceived, a book full of crazy riches, a book, I have no hesitation saying, of canonical and existential import for Armenian-Americans — I wouldn’t be surprised to discover in the three years since it was published that fewer than 3000 copies have sold.

His own people’s tepid reception probably depressed, or least befuddled, Kherdian, but after reading Gatherings, I’m pretty sure that he would have done it all over again if he had known the numbers up front. If one thing is evident, it is this: Kherdian loves the writing life, and he is a true believer in the book. We learn in Gatherings that he had the biggest and best publishers in the world, and when he put a manuscript in front of them that wasn’t their “cup of tea,” far from crying in it, he and his wife, Caldecott-winning illustrator Nonny Hogrogian, designed, bound and sewed by hand their own books for their own press. He came of age as a writer when that’s what poets did; even if they pushed it out in mimeograph machines, even if the only takers were each other. Pure faith sustained by grace, that’s what that was about, and maybe still is. I say maybe, because with instant this and on-demand that, YouTube and Twitter, video games and all the rest, I can’t help but wonder about the necessity of faith. I can’t help but think that we’ve entered a new dispensation.

But let me put that aside, and work on the assumption that it’s all good for the moment and that the journey is still worth every blessed step. Let us all pause to give this man a salute. If Saroyan was our greatest writer, Kherdian, with sixty-six books to his name, is certainly our most industrious — and will leave an enduring mark on American letters in a different, but no less significant, way than did his mentor. I recommend this wonderful book if you want to get a sense of what I mean, and why I feel as strongly about it as I do.

Gatherings: Select and Uncollected Writings by David Kherdian is available on the writer’s website and on Amazon and other online booksellers.