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By David Pollack I arrived in Berkeley as a freshman in 1960 and immediately moved into Barrington Hall Co-op. But after just a year I’d had my fill and began casting around for a different place to call home. My mother mentioned that a college friend of hers owned a large old house on Oregon Street, just above Telegraph, near campus. This friend, whose name was Pauline Kael ’40, had finally managed to extricate her ex-husband from the garden cottage at the rear of the house and was now looking for someone to rent it. At the age of 19, I wasn’t thrilled at the notion of living in such proximity to a friend of my mother’s, but the word “garden cottage” had a beatnik ring to it, a status to which I had vaguely aspired ever since arriving in Berkeley. I phoned the number, and a woman with a gravelly voice on the other end told me to come around later to have dinner and talk. The Oregon Street house was as she described it--a typical Berkeley wood-shingled house covered with vines. The door was opened by a thin, pale girl who looked about 8 years old and was working to restrain two small, eerily silent but very nervous dogs. An elfin Gina Kael ushered me into a living room filled with what was to be a regular cast of characters: a long-haired young man playing Chopin brilliantly on a Steinway upright; a slender and somewhat gamin young mathematics grad student who served as Pauline’s secretary and typist; a plump young Stanford prof with a jolly laugh who held forth on Brecht and Marx; a tall, thin, wispy man with nervous affectations whose conversation was all music and art and philosophy; and, on that particular evening, Pauline was in the position she occupied permanently in the house at all hours--hovering over a heap of manuscripts, scribbling loudly with pencil in one hand while alternating sips of scotch and puffs of Camels with the other, and emitting little sounds of concern. She had the habit of holding her breath as she began each sentence and gasping explosively for air only when she reached its end. (I have always thought that this was the reason she wrote so quickly, a variant on the Zen adage of no work, no food--no writing, no air.) She worked best when the house was full of life, conversation, music (Glenn Gould was a favorite, but also everything from The Threepenny Opera to Oscar Peterson), as her two silent dogs (Basenjis don’t bark) paced nervously up and down, their untrimmed toenails clicking away on the hardwood floors. It was a scene of creative energies run amok, and I fell in love with it. The cottage itself turned out to be a wonderful affair--two open rooms under a low-angled roof, entirely engulfed in passion-flower vines, at the back of a small garden that sported more varieties of plant life than I had ever seen--purple princess magnolias, white magnolias, star magnolias, night-blooming jasmine, honeysuckle, anemones, plum and apricot blossoms, freesias, alliums, poppies and lupine, and profusions of Peruvian tiger lilies of every stripe and color. The west-facing wall gave out onto a dense grove of bamboo, in which a nightingale would sing deliriously on warm spring nights (the only one I have ever heard). The small side-room was almost completely taken up by a large bed and dresser; in the other, an enormous claw-foot desk took up much of one wall. A single large closet in the entryway was faced with sliding wooden doors decorated with an exotic painting of the Garden of Eden. (I found out later that it had been painted by Jess Collins, the San Francisco artist best known as the lover of the poet Robert Duncan.) For $275 a month, including dinner whenever I cared to join the crowd, this fragrance-filled hideaway was to be my home for the next three years. I stayed for dinner that night, along with Pauline’s usual crowd, who quickly treated me as one of their number. Pauline made several dishes well, but I remember only one: chicken with rosemary sauce, which I thought the most delicious thing I had ever eaten in my life, always served with tossed green salad with an exquisite lemon and oil dressing. There was wine and talk and laughter and yelling and food and smoke that night, and I felt as if I had been part of this wonderfully fertile atmosphere forever. Everyone had an assigned role: the pianist, the mathematician, the aesthete, the littérateur. I became the orientalist because I had for some reason embarked on the study of Chinese, a pursuit arcane enough to immediately qualify me as the Arthur Waley of this little Bloomsbury. It became my job to order whenever we went out to eat at Yee’s, the favored Chinese restaurant at the corner of University and Shattuck. My orders, delivered with great aplomb and never understood by the staff, quickly became a standing joke, especially since the first thing I knowledgably ordered was something called yun tui or “cloudy thigh.” I had no idea what it was, I just loved the poetic sound of it. This turned out to be an enormous leg of pork, cooked in five-spice and exotic wines and sauces, so cloying and filling that even six of us could scarcely make a dent in it. The “Peking Duck” I ordered one night didn’t help either; what finally arrived at the table, watched over by the entire staff, turned out to be diced cubes of cold duck fat quivering on a bed of lettuce. It was a while before I realized that, while I was studying Mandarin, the staff of Yee’s spoke only Cantonese. Since Cantonese was the only language spoken across the Bay in Chinatown as well (the nearest Mandarin-speaking community was in Vancouver), I might as well have been studying Hungarian for all the good it did me. Pauline rarely accompanied us on these culinary misadventures. We went out mostly when it became clear that she was too far lost in the throes of writing to be bothered with anything as mundane as making dinner; and since no one else in the group had any idea how to cook, we could only go out, leaving her behind, a lone frumpy figure with disheveled hair, rumpled woolen skirt and sweater, face hidden behind impossibly thick tortoise-shell framed lenses, standing in colored puddles of Tiffany light and gasping for air in a fug of smoke, scotch, Bach, and nervous tap-dancing dogs. Pale little Gina, whom I had taken to be 7 or 8, turned out to be closer to 13, which helped account for her precocious, grown-up air. She was small and pale because she had been born with a health problem that caused Pauline no end of worry. I think that one of the things that drove Pauline to write as prolifically as she did in those days--beyond her brilliant vocation--was the need to accumulate enough money for the expensive operations that finally saved her only child’s life. Gina was always more than a child and young daughter; she was Pauline’s main confidante, the one person with whom she shared her plans and projects, and she talked to her as one would to an adult best friend. I would come upstairs (I had the run of the house) late of a weekend morning to ask Pauline something and find them snuggled up in bed together, engrossed in serious or giggling confabs. I had never seen a mother-daughter relationship like it, and was puzzled and touched in equal parts. For me, too, Pauline was as much mother figure as friend. I was a callow youth, with little regard for others, and she would sometimes have to act in loco parentis to curb my worst impulses. There were times when she lost her temper at me (such as when all-night music-fests in the cottage kept her from sleeping), but she never held a grudge, and I could always count on being invited in for dinner the next night. Pauline was part-owner of the Cinema Guild theater, then still on Telegraph Avenue on the corner of Haste, where all of Berkeley went Pauline’s writing could be brilliant and funny, but her in-your-face attitude always left me feeling that her appeal derived more from her personal style, marked by opinionated, passionate, and all too often ad hominem attacks, than from what I liked to think of as reasoned analysis. But Pauline wasn’t a scholar with the ideal of some mythical objectivity. She was a journalist and thinker and writer, the person you really wanted to talk to about a film when you had just come out of the theater excited or depressed (although we almost never agreed on films). I could never understand how anyone could become so passionate and carried away over what I thought of then as mere ideas; it took me a long time to understand that ideas can have very high stakes indeed. Pauline lived and breathed ideas. I lived in a series of old Berkeley houses until I got my Ph.D. and left the city in 1976. Now, whenever I come back and look into such houses, I wonder if ideas are fermenting inside as they were in the house on Oregon Street. I can only hope they are. At the time, I simply took it all for granted--the life of the mind, culture, talk about ideas--as the young do. And now that’s it’s too late, I wish I could tell Pauline how much that time meant to me. David Pollack ’65, M.A. ’68, Ph.D. ’76, grew up to teach Japanese literature and comparative literature at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Reading against Culture. |
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