Hav Gefter

Hav Gefter (1931-2006) was an American writer, a prolific craftsman in love with the English language, who put millions of deliberately chosen words on paper, who wrote a succession of fascinating literary works, and who was only published in the very last two years of his life. His works are noted for their honest and graphic descriptions of sex and human behavior, but more for their invention and use of language.

When Hav Gefter died in February of 2006, he left behind a massive legacy. A half century of writing filling thousands of pages, binder upon binder, box upon box. Much of this is in the form of letters and journals, but an appreciable part of it makes up the series of unique and compelling books he wrote beginning in the late 1960s, with the two volume "Pisse not on Their Ashes."

It had been a long and arduous road to that point, almost twenty years of constant writing. In the 1950s Hav Gefter had been a writer of short stories, all of them written with the classic voices of his great idols in mind. Joseph Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Knut Hamson, and many others, all beloved from many years of passionate reading and studying.

In 1957 he began to keep a journal and began the habit of long and detailed daily accounts, often complete with pages of conversations recalled verbatim. These journals, running nonstop from 1957 to 1968, would alone constitute a literary legacy of note, had he not written another word in his life. Detailed and compelling, written with passion and fervor, they stand as one of the great achievements in journal writing, a day to day account of mid-twentieth century American life as lived and noted by an American original.

In late 1968, Hav Gefter put a blank sheet of paper into his Smith-Corona portable typewriter and began a new project. This work, the first of the two volume "Pisse not on Their Ashes," represents an almost supernatural explosion of writing growth; after almost twenty years of writing, Hav Gefter had found his voice, and it seemed to come to him over night, fully formed, a writing style that would propel him with an ever increasing sense of power through two more decades of writing.

Although the style abruptly matured and the words suddenly jumped to life on the page, the subject matter remained exactly the same: Hav Gefter's life. The day to day journals stopped and in their place came works that continued to examine the people, events, feelings, intimacies, concerns, fears and hopes of that life. Only now the writer, freed from the limitation of daily entries, could shape these dramas in any form he desired.

The two ground breaking volumes of "Pisse Not on Their Ashes" were followed, in the 1970s, by a series of personal works, each of them a stunning achievement of style and power. Though each of these books has a story to tell, the story itself is not the point; all story telling devices are absent, leaving only the potent power of the English language itself, shaped and formed by Hav Gefter into the most memorable images ever.

Hav Gefter lived for the English language and poured his heart and life out in an endless stream of words. But those words never found publication. Except for a brief stint reporting on the Dan White trial for the San Francisco paper, the Bay Area Reporter, he remained unread and unpublished.

That he continually failed is probably due to several factors. To begin with, there is the obvious, the obsession with sex. Even his most personal friends found his writing too naked and raw; it seemed to trespass all rational boundaries of decency. But it was never Hav Gefter's intention to titillate or arouse. He was not writing pornography. In fact, the unique thing about his writing is that sex was treated no different than any other area of life, and if anyone had a problem with that, it wasn't his problem.

The other obstacle to recognition was his total disregard for any story telling convention. He cared not for plots, chapters, devices, gimmicks, or anything that might shape or guide a reader's attention. Like a mad painter attacking his canvas he just sat and wrote. He did go through drafts and spent much time rewriting sections, changing words and moving paragraphs around, for he was very conscious of the use of words themselves. But of the bigger picture, the shaping of a story, he had a blind spot.

The result was often a manuscript that started and went full steam and then stopped. He cared not for a beginning or an ending. There were rarely chapters or any kind of organization. There was little a reader would recognize as a standard literary form. It did not bode well when offering these works to agents and publishers. And yet what power there is in this work!

Hav Gefter is not for everyone. He has no casual readers. You either love him or hate him. If you are a true lover of the English language, you may well become one of the former.