History of My Reading: To Stony Creek and Buffalo 1969-70

Stony Creek, Connecticut 1969/70.  BK photo.

 After my months in Berkeley, I flew to Chicago in late October or early November 1969.  I visited for a few days with Jeremy Gladstone (a friend from Knox College) who was back from Europe and staying at the family home in Park Forest until he sorted out his next move.  In Europe Jeremy had acquired a taste for Pernod, one of the anise-based French liqueurs, a legal form of absinthe.  He showed me how to drink it over ice, with water.

  One evening he invited a group of former Knox friends, and initiated them as well.  I’m pretty sure Howard Partner was among them.  We sat around a table drinking Pernod.  I think it was on this occasion that I got a better appreciation for how far apart these Chicagoland suburbs really are.  It took longer for everyone to get there and to get back than the time we spent together.

 My next stop was the family home in Greensburg.  This was likely a short visit because I was soon on my way to rejoin Joni in Connecticut.  I got myself there by first going to Washington for the second Moratorium demonstration against the Vietnam War on November 15.  This turned out to be officially the largest Washington demonstration of the war.  I may have gone down with my friend Mike or maybe I met him there because he was stationed nearby.  He had been drafted into the Army the year before.  So I marched against the war in the company of an active duty soldier (or in his case, chaplain’s assistant.) 

Many demonstrators from distant places came on rented buses, and so my plan was to find a bus returning to New Haven and hitch a ride. Not really a mad strategy in 1969.  In any case, the plan worked. Mike and I found a bus going to New Haven and they had empty seats.  I even got acquainted with someone on the bus who offered to put me up for the night when I couldn’t reach Joni upon our arrival.  In the morning I met his wife, and he and I traded versions of Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country” (I knew the Nashville Skyline version in G, he knew the original version in C.) Then I called Joni again and she came to pick me up.

 Joni had found a small place in a village called Stony Creek, directly on Long Island Sound, about eight miles from New Haven.  As I recall, it was three rooms in a building set back from the main drag, Thimble Island Road.  Though oysters and lobster fishing were part of its identity, the “stony” in Stony Creek likely came from the quarry.  Before it closed at the beginning of the 20^th century, it supplied pink granite for the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, and the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Probably Thimble Island Road.  BK photo.

 With a population of about a thousand, Stony Creek was part of the town of Branford, Connecticut.  An article I clipped from the New York Times a decade later began with the quip of an unnamed critic: “Every town has its village idiot, but only Branford has an idiot village.”  This article made much of Stony Creek’s resistance to change; specifically to tourism.  I don’t know if it’s still that way, though photos on line don’t give me that impression.

 The 1979 Times article suggested that many residents were employed at Yale, and perhaps that was the case to some extent also in 1969.  Across the Sound from Stony Creek there were houses where groups of Yale Law students lived.  One of them was named Bill Clinton. His girlfriend Hillary was often around.  Joni’s brother-in-law was at Yale Law, and she attended a party over there sometime before I’d arrived.  Perhaps they met. 

I don't know if it was a cultural high point but in the late 1930s, Stony Creek had a summer theatre, operated by two women who also interned for the legendary Mercury Theatre in New York, run by John Houseman and Orson Welles, often the star in its productions.  This is how Stony Creek hosted a Mercury Theatre show for a week prior to its Broadway debut. Unfortunately the tryout was so dismal that the show never opened--only those who came to Stony Creek, like Katharine Hepburn, ever saw it. She stole one of the actors, Joseph Cotton, for her 1939 Broadway hit, The Philadelphia Story, which revived her career. 

That New York Times article sings the praises of Stony Creek in summer, but I saw it only in the dead of winter, intermittently from November through February (with some time back in Greensburg for Christmas, which extended well into January to avoid Joni’s parents, visiting her and her sister.  They were not my allies.) 

BK

 Still, even though it was dim and frigid (or sunny and slushy) much of the time, I liked our corner of Stony Creek by the Sound. The Sound wasn’t the ocean but it was something, and it was always there.  I wrote this about it:

 Dredging the gray sky,/the winter wind sears home./Against the window/it pours/stinging rain from the sea./Though it does not leap into the warm kitchen/I go out to meet it/greet it/say hello/and come back in.

 Something about that dynamic suited me then, and still does. Besides the Sound, there was very little else in Stony Creek, at least within walking distance, except farther down Thimble Island Road there was a small store--and a public library.  It was (and is) the Willoughby Wallace Library, built in 1956 thanks to a bequest by the eccentric but public-spirited Mr. Wallace, plus an architect’s donated design, and donated town granite.  

So this bright substantial building was pretty new when I discovered it, amazed it was there.  I was inside it just after 3 in the afternoon, and found it was a prime hangout for high school students after school.  They sat around sunny tables, munching candy from the store and debriefing the day: who got in trouble on the bus that morning, who got ripped last weekend, plus demonstrations of how Martha and Jennifer walk. (As well as casting suspicious glances at the possible narc with the long hair, taking notes.)

 Around 4, they were replaced by a noisy bunch of grade schoolers.  “I wonder what menstruation means?”  I watched a third grader look over a Jimi Hendrix album.  Others laughed over the magazines, or broke into whispery, gossipy groups. 

 The library became my regular destination—walking past the abandoned offices of Pacific Sanchero, Permittee, and the house with the multicolored design painted by a summer tenant, who also inscribed on its wall “Latch onto a feather.”  In relatively good weather, I could sit on a stone bench outside, if it wasn’t already occupied by the aforementioned students.

 It was in this library that I discovered an author I would follow for the rest of his life: Ronald Sukenick. Very likely his latest book was on display, with a title bound to catch my eye: Death of the Novel and Other Stories.  (The “death of the novel” was a thing, long before—and much different than-- the death of the author.) 

Sukenick

The stories amazed me—I hadn’t read anything like them before.  Today some might qualify as “metafiction,” or be called deconstruction.  At the time they felt to be attempts to find new forms commensurate with the current fractious and fractured reality, as well as further forays in expanding the possibilities of writing by essentially playing with some of those possibilities.  These stories were basically comic, and in a sense conventional—the experiments were part of the story, as for example, when he includes a transcript of a conversation with his wife with a tape recorder between them.  When the conversation becomes uncomfortable for him, he wants to turn the tape off.  (At least that’s how I remember it, from a re-reading ten years ago or so.)

 So I was delighted to find in the library stacks a copy of his novel, Up, published the previous year.  It also played with narrative—the initial character was a writer, so part of it is about a character he’s writing (Strop Banally), including the changes he’s making along the way (the character’s hair color, etc.)  It also threads other narratives, but again includes critiques of their discontinuities and excesses as part of the story.

 Sukenick seemed only a little older, and I immediately bonded with our similarities in outlook and literary attempts, ignoring many differences.  Writing conventional narrative seemed superficial and false to many in those nuclear psychedelic Vietnam Nixonated days.  I didn’t get all he was doing or trying to do, but I was attracted to the mosaic form and the irreverent style I’d been drawn to in the Beatles, Vonnegut, Donleavy, Joseph Heller, etc.

My Sukenick collection, minus "Mosaic," hiding somewhere

 But Sukenick became a hard author to follow—even as a reader.  Those first two books were from major publishers, but subsequent ones were from small presses, including the organization he helped to start, the Fiction Collective.  At least a few times I found his books on carts of university bookstores sale books.  I found his 1986 novel Blown Away (Sun and Moon Press) deep in a pile of discount books on my last visit to the Harvard Coop bookstore.  But I managed to get copies of all of his novels, and one collection of stories.  I still have most of them, including his last, easily the best fiction I’ve read about 9/11, Last Fall.  I even have his extremely useful book on Wallace Stevens, Musing the Obscure, from his earlier life as a very perceptive and methodical literary scholar.  He died in 2004.

 Sukenick was a named character in Up, and the novel followed other characters (his boyhood friends mostly) who also were a little older than me.  There were retrospective scenes from their past, though I wasn’t much interested in them at the time. (Now they seem vivid.) What impressed me was that this was contemporary fiction about contemporary times and people.  Characters smoked dope and talked about revolution (though usually their complicated reasons for supporting it and not supporting it simultaneously.)  They were out of school (though some were teaching) and trying to find a place in a society they feared and loathed. That got my attention, as I was just beginning that journey.

 When I wasn’t in Stony Creek, I was in New Haven, a 20 minute bus ride away.  My efforts to find a job—desperate, muddled and halfhearted simultaneously-- were focused there. I checked bulletin boards and the newspapers, including the Yale student paper. 

 In one of those papers I saw an ad for volunteers for a Yale psychology department experiment “in learning” that paid $25 for a few hours.  I called the number and asked for more information on what this experiment entailed.  My first suspicion was that it involved drugs, and at this point in my life I wasn’t eager to let others experiment on me. The female voice on the other end assured me there were no drugs but when I asked other questions she was persistently evasive. That turned my suspicions into alarm bells.  As much as I needed the money, I didn’t participate.

 Years later I realized that this was very probably an early iteration of the famous (or infamous) Milgram experiments. (This was pretty much confirmed for me in a book by psychologist Elliot Aronson when he described what subjects were told the experiments were about—precisely what that ad said.) 

The Milgram experiments were one of the most often cited psychology experiments of modern times.  Participants were instructed to give electric shocks to people in the next room if they answer questions incorrectly.  With each wrong answer the shock is intensified, until the victim can be heard screaming in pain and begging to be released from the experiment. The victims weren’t actually getting shocks—they were in on the con.  The experiments weren’t about learning; they were to see how many people will follow instructions and administer the shocks, even after hearing cries of pain and the begging. 

 The answer was a shockingly high percentage of them.  I first heard it reported as 100%.  Later the figure given for those willing to administer the maximum voltage was 64%.  The experiment is usually said to prove two main points: that people will do what authority tells them to do, and that people will do so in situations even if they believe that they wouldn’t, regardless of their personal ethics.

 But here’s the problem.  To make such an inference about people in general, the participants had to accurately represent the population.  This is the fatal flaw of most such psychological experiments (participants are mostly students who always need money, and overwhelmingly white.) In this experiment, those who actually participated had to be willing to take the unquestioned word of authorities, without knowing what they were getting into, just to walk in the door. So they were self-selected pre-disposed. But how many people like me smelled something fishy and just didn’t participate?  On the other hand, how many participants needed the $25 enough to do what they were told?

 Think about it: this was Yale in 1969 and 1970.  There were antiwar protests on campus.  William Sloane Coffin, an advocate for defying the draft and therefore the authority of the government, was a campus hero.  Part of the huge generation gap was the distrust many younger people had for the honesty and veracity of those in authority in the government, the university  and big business.  Scientific research secretly funded by the military was a big issue on many campuses.

 So if you were against the killing and the maiming in Vietnam, to the extent of resisting the government’s orders to do so, or even if you were a stoned peace and love hippie, how likely is it that you were going to push a button to cause somebody pain?  I’ve seen photos of these experiments—there was no long hair, no countercultural clothing in any of them. 

 (These experiments, now considered unethical, are often cited along with the equally notorious Stanford  experiments that purported to prove that people given the role of prison guard invariably act in sadistic ways towards prisoners.  This was a much-cited finding in the corporate world of the 1980s and 1990s, though the experiments have largely been discredited.) 

My perspective on the Milgram experiments led to my skepticism of many psychological experiments, and books about them.  I found support in the work of eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan, particularly in his book Psychology’s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back, in which he gently but definitely questioned whether universal conclusions about behavior can be based on small numbers of culturally identical subjects in a laboratory setting.

 In any case, the stark divide in the late 1960s was something I keenly felt.  Even before the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, there was amply evidence of systematic lying in high places.  All our literature, movies and music questioned the moral authority if not the intelligence of those running things.  Apart from my ignorance of how the “adult world” worked, and how I could possibly find my way into the elements of it I still respected, my general attitude was both baffled and adversarial.  How could I make a living, and not lose myself?  I had too much yet to learn.

 “Out of college, money spent,” went the Beatles’ lyric, “see no future, pay no rent/all the money’s gone, nowhere to go.  But oh that magic feeling/ no where to go...”

 Apart from visits to my Knox friend Mike Shain, who for some reason now forgotten was living in a New Haven rooming house, with a sign on his door that said “Home of the Bobby Dylan Conspiracy,” I gravitated towards Yale. The academic campus was still the only industrial site I knew, and where I was somewhat comfortable.  I went to readings and knew how to get myself invited to the parties afterwards.  I believe that’s where I heard poet Kenneth Koch read.

He read a long poem that may have been called “Eyes.” In any case, it was my inspiration for a long poem I later wrote called “Ears,” which was published a couple of times in the mid-70s.

  I heard the poet Bill Knott, who at the time was writing under the name of St. Geraud.  I was astounded by his poems—they were the most unrelenting and mind-blowing surrealist poems I’d encountered. Also very short.  He may have read on the same bill with Koch or perhaps another poet, because I remember him being at the after-party and he left without much notice. Later I happened to be in the living room of this house when the doorbell rang and I answered it.  It was Bill Knott, looking shamefaced about returning.  I laughed.  I loved it.

 I met poet Michael Benedikt and we began a correspondence when he was back in New York.  He was interested in my writing that I sent him. This was some rare encouragement.  I was still sending things out and getting them back.

 Thinking back, it seems obvious that this would have been a good moment for a mentor to appear in my life. But it didn’t happen then, and never happened.  I later depended greatly on the faith of several editors, but they were all more or less my contemporaries.  This, like everything else, was as much my fault as anyone’s, and equally a sign of the times. 

I did manage a fair amount of writing at Stony Creek. Apart from verse and short fiction, and the usual endless notes on the novel I wasn’t writing, I once simply let go and wrote a sustained prose fiction called “Apostrophe S.”  Influenced by Sukenick but more by Vonnegut in its tone, I wrote it late at night, in the warm quiet kitchen, while Joni was asleep. I often had the company of our two kittens, named Abbey and Rhoda, who prowled around the pale plywood plank I was writing on, and chased my pen across the yellow legal pad.

 What survives of “Apostrophe S” seems to include elements added later.  Perhaps a wise editor could have helped me develop the good parts (some were quite funny) into something publishable, but in retrospect, the best part of it is remembering the experience of writing it. 

 But I did write something while at Stony Creek that was more of an indication of a direction I would later follow.  It’s not much remembered, but in late 1969, there was a brief but intense frenzy over an assertion that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash some three years before, and been secretly replaced by a lookalike.  Then the Beatles had seeded various songs with clues.  This “Paul is dead” theory led to top 40 stations all over America airing the “evidence” as well as lots of Beatles songs.  It made the news (Huntley-Brinkley, Time Magazine) and a New Haven moviehouse advertised a special showing of Yellow Submarine with the line, “Paul is alive and well in Yellow Submarine!”  Sales of Beatles albums shot up.

 But what apparently impressed me most was how seriously the high school students I saw in Stony Creek were taking it.  I realized that this was a contemporary subject of interest to my generation and younger that I knew something about, both in terms of the Beatles and what are now known as “conspiracy theories.”  The long piece I wrote about it, entitled the “The Paul Is Dead Theology,” was the kind of cultural reportage and analysis that in the not too distant future I would be writing and publishing.  But at that moment, though Michael Benedikt especially liked it and tried to get it published, it only joined my manuscript pile of futility.

 The article asserted knowledge concerning what high school students were talking about that I probably didn’t derive just from hanging around the Stony Creek library.  Joni was teaching high school, and we talked about her students.

We had happy times in Stony Creek. The music I associate with those wintry days includes the Band albums and The Papas and the Mamas, especially the song "Safe in my Garden." But our garden was not so safe. Our problem was the future, and the nature of our future together. These issues were the sources of tension, and along with external and internal pressures, were more than an undercurrent to those months.  But as far as I knew we’d come to no conclusion. 

Stony Creek sunset. BK photo.

Apart from manuscripts, I’d sent out various proposals, applications and inquiries.  I applied for a summer arts workshop at Cummington, in western Massachusetts.  I was in touch with Knox friend Steve Meyers who was in graduate school in Buffalo.  He was enthusiastic about the English department there, and urged me to come up and check things out. Perhaps I’d come to the reluctant conclusion that I didn’t know how to do anything that paid a salary except maybe teach, and if I was going to have to make a living that way, I would need an advanced degree.  Or maybe I was just looking for some income for a few years, burrowed into books.

 So one cold March morning I slid a duffel bag and my guitar case into the front trunk of Joni’s yellow VW bug. We drove first to the dump in a frozen field of thin snow, and I unloaded a bag of garbage.  I got back into the car and she drove me to an interstate ramp, so I could begin hitchhiking up to Buffalo.  After a brief farewell, she drove away.  It would be the last time I saw her.

 Shortly after I got to Steve’s in Buffalo, her letter arrived inviting me not to come back.  Over the next weeks we talked on the phone a few times and exchanged letters, but the situation didn’t change.  I was dislocated and bereft on many levels, but I don’t think I really blamed her. I certainly saw the justice of her point of view. 

 If Sukenick’s Up has a theme it would probably be to “be true to the discontinuity of experience.”  Even then, the 60s seemed an especially discontinuous and contingent time, so it seemed writing should express it.  But discontinuity is also a theme of youth.  All experience that falls outside the expected, the changes and rapid twists and turns, especially when moving among “worlds” of what passes for the traditional or normal and what seems to be new, as well as crossing undefined geographical, socio-economic (class) and other borders, is experienced as discontinuous.  It’s only later that it’s possible to sense the patterns, the continuities, even if they never become entirely clear, or they are multiple.

 There may be accidents or missed opportunities or stupid moves and so on, the memory of which may keep us up at night, but ultimately they become elements in the pattern.  For example, had a certain letter arrived a few days earlier when I was in Berkeley, my life might have taken me in a different direction, perhaps to western Canada.  And so on.  Or as we said a lot in those days, so it goes.

 In a way that’s what this project is about: partly through the agency of reading, seeing where things fall into the pattern that time has made, that can only be seen retrospectively.  In a larger sense, that’s a project of old age. 

 Events of all kinds contribute to the pattern—things that happened and did not happen, as well as things read or thought or felt or heard or seen, or desired, or feared. The influence of others at a particular time, or the lack of it. The picture will never be complete, because memory and various kinds of records of the time are almost guaranteed to be incomplete, if not distorting.  But it’s pretty clear what the pattern is of: it’s how you got to where you end up.

Virgil Thomson (r)

 Sometime in the early 1990s, I had the television on, not entirely absorbed in what I think was a documentary film about the American composer Virgil Thomson.  There was a brief scene, apparently filler, of Thomson at a party. He was talking to a young man, who I imagine was troubled about his career or his life.  Thompson was looking at him intently, and said very carefully and earnestly: “The outcome of everything is the way it happens, and the way it happens is the story of your life.”

 It took me awhile to accept this but that’s the pattern.  That’s the retrospective continuity: the story of your life. And as I am finding now, it begins to become visible when the story is pretty much over, and you’re in the coda, or maybe the last act.

 In Buffalo it was still winter.  I slept in Steve’s living room, for longer than I intended.  Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water album had come out, and I learned the first song on the second side, “The Only Living Boy in New York.”  I played it so much that a friend of Steve’s thought I’d written it.  I also liked “Papa Hobo” from that record.  Together they represented my moment. 

Bobbie and Bob Creeley

The only reading I remember was from the bookshelf in that living room: several books by William Carlos Williams, notably his essays In The American Grain.

I must have also been reading Robert Creeley’s newer poetry, since he was teaching in Buffalo, and I was seeing a lot of him.  I attended at least one of his classes, spoke with him in his office, and was at an epic party in which, at one end of the host apartment, Robert Creeley held court, surrounded by others, and at the other end, his wife Bobbie Creeley was equally the center of attention.  When Bob mentioned Bobbie's enthusiasm for palmistry and I held up my liberally creased hand, he immediately sent me to Bobbie (later known as writer and artist Bobbie Louise Hawkins), who, as predicted, exulted in the challenge.  

 I was deliberately spending time at the English department building, particularly one long row of offices, belonging to (among others) poet John Logan, fictionist John Barth, and literary critic and gadfly Leslie Fiedler, as well as Creeley.  I learned enough about them to find the ways they decorated the window in the door to their offices appropriately expressive.  Logan’s window looked like stained glass, Fiedler’s was psychedelic, Barth’s was blacked out, and Creeley’s was clear.

 I met a lot of people in the department, as well as other of Steve’s friends, especially at the almost weekly huge communal meals.  Steve remembers that we both brought guitars to a class he was teaching and improvised a song with lyrics by T.S. Eliot.   

 But it was also a moment of crisis for SUNY Buffalo, eventually including street demonstrations.  After awhile police of various kinds were called in, and there was barricades and tear gas.  Steve and I mostly listened to the reports each evening on the campus radio station.  But we also attended meetings, including a big one of the faculty (that included graduate TAs) in the College of Arts and Letters.   The issues were wide-ranging, including academic freedom (unjustified suspensions of faculty) and others I’ve frankly forgotten. 

Leslie Fiedler

 Leslie Fiedler spoke about how serious it was to call for the resignation of a university president—and why he was calling for it now. A resolution of no confidence passed overwhelmingly (according to my notebook.) Then a student came in shouting that police were on their way to a particular campus building, and so all of us marched arm in arm to that building, where nothing happened.

 There was another moment I had reason to remember later.  Before the meeting started, someone behind us cautioned that people chatting with each other needed to be careful what they said because there were probably FBI undercover agents in the crowd.  What seemed a tad paranoid though not crazy turned out to be broadly true, when the extent of FBI infiltration of antiwar and related groups was revealed.  Some agents were even provocateurs, pushing radical groups to violence.

 I’d never entertained participating in premeditated political violence, and I was skeptical of its benefits versus its human and moral costs. My attitudes towards “revolution” were also complicated. I was selective in what I felt needed to change, and how to go about obtaining that change.  Some of these attitudes were not quite conscious, so I learned something from a moment in Buffalo.

 Richard Ellmann, author of the biography of James Joyce that had meant so much to me, was teaching at the university (though I never met him.)  But I read somewhere that his collection of Joyce memorabilia was on display that month at the university library.

When I went to see it, I couldn’t find it.  A library official asked if he could help me, and when I told him, he said that unfortunately the display had to be put back in storage because of the ongoing strife in the streets.  He must have seen my expression of dismay—I’d never dreamed that angry students would sack the library but at the same time, it didn’t seem like an outrageous precaution.  And I suppose that, with my long hair and jeans, I was a bit ashamed to be a cause of such anxiety.  But he saw right away that I was a Joyce enthusiast, and sympathized.  

SUNY Buffalo campus

At some point in my Buffalo exile, I made a trip over the Canadian border for a quick visit with Bill Thompson, my former housemate our senior year at Knox.  I met his friends from the University of Hamilton where he was (or had been) a graduate student.  So cold and insistent was the Buffalo winter that it actually was warmer in Canada.

 It was at the University of Hamilton that I had my first exposure to what was then called Women’s Liberation.  I attended an open forum on the subject, run with  authority by leaders of a campus Women’s Liberation organization.  It was an eye-opener, or as we would soon learn to say, a consciousness-raiser.  A lot of their points I experienced as valid immediately, and others it took a short while to admit.  I was troubled however by how the women leaders treated a woman in the audience, who said she didn’t think women had to have a career to feel liberated or be fulfilled—she felt liberated working in her garden.  They fell on her like a ton of bricks.  Today it seems like a first iteration of the “woke” moment: it’s liberating side, and it’s tyrannical side.

 

I was still in Buffalo in April (where it was still winter), for the very first Earth Day.  Some 20 million Americans marched or otherwise participated.  It was a big deal.  (I wrote more about this here.)  I heard Ralph Nader speak, and engaged a garage mechanic in a conversation about how ecology could generate jobs. 

 In general Buffalo had calmed down in late April, until President Nixon announced the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, widening the Vietnam war. The university, along with colleges across the country, immediately erupted.  On May 4^th, National Guard troops shot and killed four Kent State students.  The war, it seemed, had come home.  There were larger protests at even more colleges, and a national student strike. For those of us a little older, Kent State crystallized a feeling we’d had for years: that we were enemies in our country.

 The University of Buffalo was shut down, and Steve and I spontaneously decided to head back to Knox College in Illinois, perhaps from some homing instinct in this crisis time.

 I had miraculously (and largely through the efforts of Robert Creeley, I’m convinced) been accepted into the SUNY Buffalo graduate English program for the following fall.  But I no longer saw myself staying there. Whatever I was going to do or be next, it wasn’t going to be in academia after all.  In the immediate sense I’d abused Steve’s hospitality for too long.  So I knew I wasn’t going back to Buffalo.

 I had also been accepted at the Cummington, Massachusetts summer arts community, all expenses paid.  Before and after that, I was back to “nowhere to go.”

 We got in Steve’s MG, and by the time we got to Ohio—and drank coffee while being stared at by truckers—we realized that outside of Buffalo, and despite the ongoing crisis, it was spring. 

History of My Reading: Booking Berkeley 1969

  “No Thyself” 

sidewalk graffiti, Berkeley 1969

Many of the countercultural concerns I heard in Berkeley were the same I’d seen in Boulder that summer (and fall) of 1969: astrology was big, we often consulted the I Ching.  “Hexagrams to horoscopes, these add the symbolic dimensions to our lives erased by technocracy,” I wrote in one of my Berkeley notebooks.

 There was also a lot of emphasis on alternative medicine and health, organic food and so on, as well as the evolving countercultural economics and politics.  But in Berkeley I quickly experienced the latest echoes of a West Coast approach to psychology.

 I kept hearing about something called encounter groups, which may or may not have been related to the Gestalt Therapy that Fritz Perls had been practicing, mostly at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, down the coast from Berkeley.  I don’t remember the exact vocabulary but there were certain phrases that I heard a lot, from the moment I got there.  

Somewhere in the years since then, I picked up a vintage copy of Perls 1969 book, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, which is basically a series of edited transcripts of Perls’ sessions, in which he focused on an individual (usually telling a dream, or trying to) but with a large group as audience and occasionally participants.  Reading this recently, I began to see the likely source of a lot I heard in 1969: the idea of stripping away “your bullshit,” of confronting illusions and habits of evasion, and being honest with yourself and others...The idea of identifying a personal mythology, which is both a public face and a private identity, and which in both instances could be fake and self-delusion...  The often repeated exhortation to “get out of your head” and pay attention to what your senses and your body were telling you.  ("Who am I in your mythology? Mike Hamrin once asked me.)

 But if I was ever introduced to Gestalt as a system, it escaped me.  I recall only fragments, most conspicuously the one that became a hippie cliche: doing your thing.  It apparently came from what Perls called the Gestalt Prayer: “I do my thing and you do your thing.  I am not in this world to live up to your expectations” (I heard that sentence a lot) “and you are not in this world to live up to mine.  You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.  If not, it can’t be helped.”  (The last part of the prayer, a little harsh for the love generation, I’d never heard before.)

 Other elements of Gestalt have become absorbed into various sorts of therapies, such as Perls’ method of interpreting dreams (his idea was that every character—in fact, every thing-- in the dream is you.)  Perls had some concepts and models (he was clearly influenced by Zen Buddhism) but even if I’d been sophisticated enough to understand this system, I probably still would have found key concepts lacking, such as the ones I eventually found through Hillman and Jung.  So I noticed this element of Berkeley counterculture without entirely understanding it. 

 But the interest in psychology would be a natural outgrowth of new living arrangements that characterized the counterculture, which involved individuals intimately in groups.  (Through Jung we get the concept of introvert, which explains a lot of how I experienced these months, when people intensely relating was stimulating for awhile but quickly exhausting.)

 Which might make this a good moment to mention what may be obvious: that I’m leaving out of this account most of the personal and interpersonal events and impressions that absorbed so much time, energy, attention and emotion at the time.  I’m not minimizing them—and I do have memories—but I couldn’t do them justice in this space, or possibly at all.  But of course, all of that interpersonal and intrapersonal activity was one basic reason for this interest in new psychologies, especially through the lens of insights gained from cannabis and psychedelics as well as the evolving counterculture itself.

 As “science” is finally confirming, cannabis and psychedelics really do expand your mind, and though this may include a consciousness of connection (“It’s all one, man!”) it happens inside your own head.  So the first effect is personal, and psychologies deriving from these experiences were starting to develop in these years (and Berkeley remains a place where they continue.)  

Today the buzzwords of “positive psychology” include self-fulfillment, flourishing, achieving potential.  These are influenced by what happened in the 1960s, since before then, the buzzwords were about fitting in, fulfilling your role, adjusting to society.  These of course persisted, and became the basis for the sneering title given to the 1970s—the Me Decade.  While excesses of self-indulgence and selfishness were part of that decade (though with a cynically different spin, these became major themes in the Reagan 80s) and some crazy stuff spun out from what had been the human potentials movement, the attention to physical, mental, and societal health, spiritual growth and an exploration of potentials were unjustly vilified and ridiculed.

 But by the time I got to Berkeley, and communes and other new living forms were features of the counterculture, the concentration only on the inside of one’s head was turning out to not be enough. Relations to others—and therefore to one’s social self, which implied a different order of psychological understanding—became necessarily active concerns. Hence the encounter groups and Gestalt therapy.

 Still, what we are likely to forget is that the drugs, the music (especially the music) and even the psychologies and spiritual trips were responding to a suppressed need for joy, for experiences of ecstasy.  So much of the cultural forms were meant to create an absence of hassles—“hassled” was a big word, a big problem—which was a precondition for freedom.  And freedom in turn was a precondition to joy and ecstasy.  And this was part of the social arrangements as well—people who could share ecstasy. These were persistently felt needs of the time, along with an insistence that it was all possible. Today it mostly may seem inconceivable.  Yet the desire for ecstasy is perennial.

 Psychedelics entered my Berkeley experience only once I can recall.  In a hapless attempt to earn some “bread,” members of our household acquired and attempted to deal a small quantity of what was purported to be LSD.  But most of what wasn’t given away was stolen.  We saved enough for one trip apiece. I had mine in the living room with the Beatles Abbey Road album.

  Others in the house (I learned later) had a heavier trip, getting deep into psychological complexities and relationships.  So while my experience was more pleasant—maybe even a little ecstatic-- it was also solitary, and beyond the music, not memorable.  (But Abbey Road is the music I associate with my Berkeley time, and another album in the house I listened to a lot, Judy Collins Who Knows Where The Time Goes.) 

 Of course, cannabis (as we call it now; grass was a more preferred term then) was more ubiquitous. I remember walking down a street in Berkeley with someone else, entirely engaged in a conversation, and about to pass two young men walking up the hill, also conversing.  One of them was holding a Berkeley joint, wrapped in yellow paper.  As we passed he simply handed me the joint and we all kept going. 

 Combining the psychology of the counterculture with its spiritual quests was Stephen Gaskin’s Monday Night Class. 

Any number of us in the household climbed into David’s bus on several Mondays to ride over to the Richmond district of San Francisco.  There on the Great Highway edging the ocean was the former Ocean Beach Pavilion Ballroom, re-named the Family Dog, which was beginning to host now legendary rock concerts that very summer of 1969, promoted by the manager of Janis Joplin’s band, Big Brother and the Holding Company.  But on Monday night, this huge space belonged to a single slim bespeckled man, a former Marine and creative writing teacher called Stephen Gaskin.

 Upwards of a thousand heads crowded their bodies into available spaces on the floor, as Gaskin held forth on a raised stage.  He was riffing on a vast area of what would be classified as Western and Eastern metaphysics, esoteric philosophies, religion, psychology, what we’d now call neuroscience, physics, biophysics, the history of the species, as well as areas then called the occult, mystical, paranormal, and so on.  This started as an actual class at San Francisco State called Unified Field Theory, and grew from there. The entry point to it all was the psychedelic experience, the stoned consciousness; the insights not from on high, but from being high.  Many of his riffs became a book titled Monday Night Class, and it is still in print in a revised and annotated edition.

 From my notebooks it’s clear that we in our household talked about things he said, and I extrapolated and commented in my notes, though the actual content is less clear.  The ideas were stimulating.  Energy is focus.  Truth is experienced.  Consciousness is paying attention.  Pay attention!

 Considering that most of his audience was high, there was a good chance that those who were paying attention to him were really paying attention.  Words on a page can’t convey the weight of those words spoken in that moment.

 “Get high, stay high,” he said.  When you are high you know the truth, and no one can lie to you."  These statements, seemingly about drug highs, may have been metaphors for higher consciousness and a particular energy state, but was that how they were heard?

 So I was also wary, suspicious of his certainty. He never qualified his statements—everything was just that: a statement.  My Catholic immersion made me sensitive to the sound of dogma, and to any sort of guru attitude or energy.  But his sort of rolling synthesis was what a lot of people in the counterculture talked and thought about.  If they weren’t as erudite as Stephen, they also came at it from their own experiences, expertise and education. 

 For the psychedelic or stoned experience was not only sensation, but perhaps the flying open of doors to a new consciousness, including cosmic consciousness (It’s all one!)   These feelings and insights suggested connections to indigenous and ancient approaches, ignored and even forbidden in the modern western world, even in the 60s.

 While Stephen spoke in metaphors of electricity and quantum physics as well as auras, such stoned insights and ideas found resonance in non-modern and non-western traditions.  So it was the 60s that jumpstarted the already seeded Bay Area interest in Buddhism and other Eastern systems.  Now pretty much part of the mainstream, they were foreign then. (Fritz Perls interpreted the Buddhist “nothingness” as meaning process, a Gestalt insight that might be revisited in terms of the now more familiar meditation practices.)

 So it seemed a natural outgrowth of the Monday Night Class when Stephen announced an upcoming three- evening event he dubbed the First Annual San Francisco Holy Man Jam.  Guest “holy men” included Ram Das, Timothy Leary and Alan Watts.  We attended one evening, when Alan Watts spoke.  Watts had been the charismatic voice for Eastern insights for decades in the Bay Area.  His radio talks are still replayed.  I seem to recall that Mike Hamrin praised in particular Watts’ The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, a modern interpretation of insights from the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism.   (Who you really are might be described as a persona of the eternal.)

 What I recall about this evening is the festive atmosphere, and the giddy experience of being ordained a minister in the Universal Life Church, sanctified by a pious inhalation on the longest bong I’d ever seen, maybe six feet.          

Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez

I missed a lot during my Berkeley time, which extended into the autumn.  I never got down to Big Sur or Yosemite.  Although I attended a few free Saturday concerts in the park in Berkeley, I couldn’t afford live music.  I didn’t even know about the mini-festival of musicians in Esalen that summer, just weeks after Woodstock (but there’s a fine documentary of it on YouTube called “Celebration at Big Sur,” with  which has breathtaking footage of a very young but musically mature Joni Mitchell.  For one thing, she sings her composition of “Woodstock” for the first time.) 

 As far as that goes, I missed Woodstock itself that August, and only read about in Life Magazine in a bookstore on Telegraph Ave at least a week afterwards, shocked that it took place in the old East while I was finally on the happening West Coast.   

Zen Buddhism was a more fashionable element of the counterculture in the Bay Area than elsewhere, but I missed the substantial change in emphasis, from concepts to practice, that was underway, principally emanating from the San Francisco Zen Center.  (Speaking of practice, however, I did attend a free, open acting class at San Francisco’s ACT, given by Del Close.  Now revered as a master of improvisational comedy, he was with the San Francisco improv group The Committee, between gigs running Chicago’s Second City. Simply sitting in a large auditorium, I learned more about acting in that hour than in college or anywhere afterwards, although it took me awhile to realize this.) 

Instead I immersed myself in my Berkeley neighborhoods.  Berkeley extends from the residential hills steeply and then gradually down to the flat downtown area, with the UC campus and the Telegraph Ave artery cutting across between them.  The hills were known to us as the land of the rich, and we only went up there a few times in the bus to scout out the furniture, appliances and other ritzy stuff left out on the street for garbage collection.  The downtown was mostly the residual province of the middle class straights.

 Since our Shattuck Street digs were close to downtown, I did visit a few places there, mostly an Italian restaurant called Giovanni’s, though mostly for coffee and maybe a small salad.  I first went there because I’d met someone in Colorado who had waitressed there.  I mentioned her to a cashier, who remembered her, and that got us acquainted. So I also went there for the company.

 But I spent most of my wandering time along Telegraph and on the UC campus.  Between hippiedom and academia—yes, that was me. 

 The places where these worlds—and many others—came together were the bookstores, and at that moment, Telegraph Ave had a lot of them.  I’d never experienced that before: going from one bookstore to another to another, in a day or over days, available to me every day.  I was in a daze.  At times I felt overwhelmed and anxious—so many books, so little time!  And no money to buy them anyway!  I worried that I didn’t belong there, that they would find me out and ask me to leave.  Sometimes I was calm enough to accept that I was in Wonderland. And eventually it began to be a little normal to be there.

 Apart from a number of small and specialty bookshops on Telegraph and adjacent side streets, there were at least four very big bookstores on the first few blocks of Telegraph from the Berkeley campus.  There was the university bookstore itself, then Cody’s Books, and two big used bookstores: Moe’s and Shakespeare and Company.  I don’t remember how big the Shamhala bookstore was inside, but it had a conspicuous storefront window. 

 Cody’s Books was the most prominent in many ways, and the one that remains in my memory.  But though I found photos online that showed several of these stores, I haven’t come across one of Cody’s as it was in 1969.  The closest are photos of both exterior and interior in 1974 or so, which look glitzier than I remember. What I seem to recall is the huge glass doors that retracted so that the bookstore was open to the air and the street.  When I walked by I could literally see into the bookstore, and that proved irresistible just about every time.

 Cody’s sold new books, lots of paperbacks (its initial claim to fame) but also lots of literary titles in hardback and periodicals.  One of my last experiences in Cody’s was picking up the new issue of the Carleton Miscellany, with my review of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.  I also got my check for it—my first paid piece of writing—while I was in Berkeley.

 Cody’s became part of Berkeley culture and politics as well.  During 60s demonstrations that often included clashes with police (always referred to in 1969 Berkeley as “pigs”), it became a medical aid station for wounded antiwarriors. 

 Judging from notebooks, I not only browsed but read in the bookstores, but I must have purchased a few used paperbacks somewhere.  For my other activity on Telegraph Av was coffee and reading (and writing—I’m surprised to find two pretty good poems in my notebook, and parts of a third.) And occasionally, eating. Our meals on Shattuck were almost exclusively oatmeal in the morning and brown rice with whatever vegetables came to hand in the evening. (These might come from dumpster dives behind the Co-op grocery, where old but still edible veggies were carefully placed by staff.)  I supplemented this diet with tuna salad sandwiches at a university cafeteria, though they would be more accurately described as a thin smear of tuna paste on sliced bread, with some carrot sticks on the side.  But it was cheap.

 I also frequented a small Mexican restaurant on Telegraph called La Fiesta.  They placed a basket of chips on the table and gave you a glass of water, no matter what you ordered.  What I usually ordered was coffee.  But I got the chips, and sympathetic waitresses might refill both cup and basket as I sat absorbed in my reading.  The taste of those chips and that coffee still adhere to at least the first two volumes of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrine Quartet. (On my last visit to Telegraph Ave in 2003, that restaurant was still there, pretty much the same—though it was just about the only thing that was.)

 In Justine, Durrell’s prose was mesmerizing even when I’d lost track of what was going on or why.  I then found a volume of Durrell’s correspondence with Henry Miller, probably in Cody’s, and read some of it there.

 
I quote in a Berkeley notebook from Kenneth Patchen’s Journal of Albion Moonlight, an apocalyptic antiwar novel that was all but suppressed in 1941 for the next 20 years but became a legendary work of the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat era of the 50s and 60s.  Patchen was revered as well within the counterculture (Jim Morrison was a fan.)  I have a used copy now, but I don’t know when I acquired it.  Maybe in Berkeley.   

 My notebooks also mention Frank Budgen’s book on James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses.  Budgen was an artist who knew Joyce in Zurich.  I recognize the paperback cover of the time, so I must have read that one and possibly owned it, though it is not now among my Joyce collection.

 However, my continuing Joyce obsession did lead to a compulsive purchase.  High on a shelf in Cody’s Books I spotted the second two volumes of Joyce’s letters, edited by Richard Ellmann.  Though the price for these hardbacks was a bargain, they were still too much for me. 

 They were high enough on the shelf to require a ladder, so I felt diffident about asking to look at them more than once. But every time I went in or even passed by, I glanced up to see if they were still there.  Finally, when I knew I was leaving Berkeley, I broke down and used some of my travel money to buy them.  I still have them, though I can’t say I’ve spent a lot of time reading the letters. 

Those bookstores had a quantity and variety of books, including arcane collections of the past—from obscure literary and specialized scholarly works to an era’s worth of pulp science fiction—that would have fed a lifetime of voracious curiosity.  But they didn’t last for my lifetime.

 Cody’s was still there in 2003, both on Telegraph and downtown Berkeley, where I happened on a reading by Maxine Hong Kingston, shortly after my review of her Fifth Book of Peace appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. (I met her afterwards and she was pleased that my review “got it.”)  But the Telegraph Ave. Cody’s closed for good just three years later in 2006—it had been at that location since 1965-- and the downtown store closed two years after that, victims of high rents.

 Shakespeare & Company closed in 2015, after 51 years.  The Shambhala bookstore opened in 1968, offering spiritual books with an emphasis on Buddhism.  In 1969, Shambhala published its first book, and has since become the foremost publisher of non-Western books on spirituality in America.  The publishing side soon moved to Boulder and Boston, while the Berkeley bookstore lasted until 2003.

   Many other smaller bookstores of that era are also gone.  Of the big four, only Moe’s remains, and the university bookstore, which if it follows the national pattern, would be mostly sweatshirts and other branded merchandise, with barely a whiff of a non-textbook, or even a book shelf.    

 

Gary Snyder (l), Lew Welch (r) with fellow
poet and Reed College pal Philip Whalen (c)

 Near the end of my stay in Berkeley, I attended a poetry reading for Ecology Action and the Ecology Center that turned out to be a bit historic.  It featured some of the better known poets of the time in the Bay Area, a group that likely never read together again.  I wrote about it at the time.

 The event was held in the Pauley Ballroom on the UC Berkeley campus.  I arrived early enough to get a seat in the orderly rows of folding chairs.  Eventually the master of ceremonies, one of the ecologists, came to the microphone.  “I know this might be difficult, but if somehow some room can be made at the back of the ballroom, more people could get in.” 

 Instantly a cacophony of scraping chairs as everyone moved them towards the front, obliterating the rows and clumping closer together.  The ecologist m.c. watched, and when it was quiet again he said, “What just happened was very much like the action of wind, or water.  I think we’re ready to begin.”

 The poets who read included veterans of the Beat era: Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lew Welch and David Meltzer.  Welch and Snyder were former classmates and roommates at Reed College, and maintained a close friendship.  The more recent counterculture star was Richard Brautigan. 

 Gary Snyder was the crowd favorite (I noted). During some poems there was applause after every line.  Brautigan read his short non-sequiter poems, marching or preening around the stage during the laughter and applause between them.  McClure was more quietly but respectfully received.  David Meltzer spoke of the sensations of a city boy moving to a cabin in Marin County.

 I’d heard Snyder read at Knox College some three years before, which seemed like a lifetime, and maybe in a way it was.  But I recall—and I wrote at the time—that I was otherwise most impressed by Lew Welch. 

“A tall, theatrically handsome but obviously gentle man, he read poems about a child’s view of the world,” I wrote. But the moment that most impressed me and stayed with me was Welch reading his epic poem, “The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings.”  Mt. Tam is the sacred mountain outside of San Francisco.  It became a rite among poets and hippies to “circumambulate” it—that is, walk around it as a ritual. Mike Hamrin and I had done it earlier in my stay. 

 Besides being a paean to the Bay Area, where (he said) all American revolutionary movements began, Welch’s poem sums up the movement of Europeans across North America, pushing beyond one frontier after another.  Essentially it’s the story of humanity, always looking for a better place, and despoiling it before they move on, knowing there’s more.  But in California, they reached the limit.  Welch’s haunting refrain was: “This is the last place.  There is nowhere else to go.” 

 In the context of an ecology reading, he was talking about Earth itself.  I never forgot that line, or that moment.

 Less than two years later, Welch disappeared into the Sierras with a gun, leaving behind an old suicide note. He was never found.  At a publication event for a posthumous volume of Welch’s poems in 2012, Snyder said Welch could not overcome his alcoholism.  David Meltzer called Welch his “demented mentor.”  When I spoke on the phone to Michael McClure in 2004, I mentioned this Berkeley reading and he remembered it as a special occasion.

 Finally, there was a repeated experience of my Berkeley stay that for me characterizes that time and place, or at least the brighter side of it.  It was the Saturday Night Midnight Movies. 

First, though, you have to know something about the tradition of the Saturday afternoon matinees at the movies.  Back when most films were seen in the movie palaces of cities and towns, there were Saturday matinees for children, beginning in the 1930s and continuing probably until the hegemony of mall cinemas and multiplexes. 

 The standard movie program for adults as late as the 1950s and possibly later called for: a cartoon, the newsreel, a short (usually a comedy, like Chaplin or Laurel & Hardy), the latest episode of a serial (always ending with a cliffhanger), previews of “Coming Attractions,” a “B” movie feature, and then the main feature, just released that week.  The Saturday matinee started out with the same basic mix, but the features were selected for kids.  The main feature was often new or fairly new, but might be an old favorite. 

 By the time my early Baby Boom generation was old enough in the 1950s, the Saturday matinee was even more elaborate. It might start at noon or even before, with a dozen or two or three dozen cartoons.  At least one of the movies might be an older science fiction, horror or adventure film.  The entire program might keep us in the theater until 5 p.m.  The point being that everyone in Berkeley in 1969 could have attended Saturday matinees as children.

 I don’t remember which theater held the Midnight Movies.  I have a vague feeling it wasn’t the Repertory on Telegraph, where during my stay I saw Yellow Submarine and Lindsay Anderson’s ...If again, but downtown.  In any case, the Midnight Movies in Berkeley were essentially a Saturday matinee program for heads.  There was no disguising the assumption that everyone in the audience would be high, or would be getting high during the shows. Being high in some ways returns the sensory acuity, intense belief and openness that the years erode.  So this was the Saturday matinee on dope, and we were children again. 

 There were differences.  The audience behaved badly (in a fun, good-natured way), which no theater manager would have tolerated for long on Saturday afternoons.  (I can remember only a few instances of general rowdy behavior in my youth, mostly when the movie was boring.  I especially recall a showing of one of the Lone Ranger feature films (there were two, with basically the same plot.)  As we walked in, we were all given a plastic silver bullet as a movie promotion.  But the movie wasn’t very engaging, and I remember being in the balcony at one point, watching the silver bullets crisscrossing in front of the screen as kids below threw them across the auditorium.)

  At the Berkeley shows, bad behavior usually amounted to throwing popcorn at each other, crawling over seats and being loud in response to what was on the screen.  It was hilarious.  But as it was Berkeley there was also political critique.  Whenever a policeman appeared on the screen, there were boos and shouts of “pig!”  When the Laurel & Hardy or other comedy short was silent, the entire crowd read the subtitles out loud together, and if the line was addressed to a police officer, usually some version of a Keystone Kop, the word “pig” was spontaneously added.  Crowds in Berkeley, I wrote at the time, weren’t like those in other places: people there seemed comfortable in the identity of a crowd.  That was certainly true at the movies. 

There was a newsreel, but it was from some week in the 50s or 40s. There were cartoons, a serial, a short, and a feature.  Some were culled from the archives of our childhood: I specifically remember seeing George Pal’s 1951 apocalyptic science fiction movie, When Worlds Collide.  It was the first time I’d seen it since one of those childhood matinees, so I was revisiting it in that late 60s apocalyptic context.  But after the world literally ends and a single space ship of survivors lands on a new world that I had experienced as wondrous, I saw this time that this new Eden was an obvious painted flat backdrop.  Which was another kind of a message. 

The other movie I recall from a midnight show was the Busby (no relation to the city) Berkeley musical Gold Diggers of 1935.  It was the first B.B. movie I’d ever seen, and it was on the big screen, augmented for me by being high, so I was mesmerized.  But the wide-openness of that state has had its drawbacks in my life, and this was one of those memorable times.

  I was totally immersed in the long and immensely elaborate song and dance sequence for “Lullaby of Broadway,” and totally unprepared—and undefended—for the climax, in which at the height of the frenzy the female singer is suddenly pushed accidentally off a balcony and falls to her death. So much for musical comedy. This may or may not have been a dream sequence, but I was shocked and sobered.  A downer, man. And as some things do in that state, it seemed portentous and symbolic beyond the bounds of an old movie.

 All during my months in Berkeley, I was writing and receiving letters.  Apart from friends and family members, a lot of them were to and from Joni, who had started teaching in Connecticut. In a way also I was being called home. Eventually I decided to head back East. 

 Of my original housemates on Shattuck, Phil had already left.  The others were embroiled but restless.  Mike Hamrin’s girlfriend referred to my “solemn and tacit presence,” a characterization I’ve never forgotten, for it was both a revelation and inarguable.

  At times it was a close thing, but my life didn’t catch in Berkeley. My head was not always there, and not always in the present. Maybe I was too much the spectator.  “All Berkeley really needs,” I wrote in a notebook, “is a proscenium arch.” Though with the gate to the UC campus, maybe it had one.  And it was on the UC campus one sunny afternoon that a stray dog came straight over to me, licked my hand, lay down at my feet, and went to sleep.