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Beginnings of a literary life A Berkeley paper route and the neighborhood encounters that inspired a career. By Steve Wasserman Geography is fate. In the fall of 1964, a year after my parents left a hamlet in Oregon for the cosmopolitan seductions of Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement burst forth. A kid on the cusp of adolescence, I learned to run a mimeograph machine from David Goines, FSM’s printer. (Goines would go on to design the original poster for Alice Waters’ restaurant, Chez Panisse. And in that trajectory, perhaps, the odyssey of an entire political movement is inscribed.) Although the media largely chose to report Berkeley’s irruptions of activism as singular, the truth was that Berkeley had a long history of dissent. Even Robert S. McNamara B.A. ’37, principal architect of the Vietnam War, later would recall with considerable affection the heated political ferment of the university he knew as a student. But Berkeley, the city was more conservative. Many of its residents regarded the political passions of students in their midst as dangerously provocative. Not so my parents. They sought out the friendship—dare I say comradeship—of malcontents and bohemians who had made their way over the years to the town whose early boosters had dubbed it “the Athens of the West.” Jessica Mitford, the quixotic muckraker with the aristocratic pedigree, regularly punctured the pompous and the duplicitous with her instinct for the jugular and her unerring wit. Fred Cody was another. A stand-up guy with an affection for the unfiltered cigarettes that one day would kill him, he had made his way west from the impoverished hill country of West Virginia by way of Columbia University on the GI Bill. He and his wife Pat founded a bookstore that still bears his name. He banished the distinction between paperbacks and hardcovers and, like Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in San Francisco, championed the independent press, the neglected, the offbeat, and the marginal writers, poets, and other misfits gathered in the Bay Area. Cody’s radical patriotism and socially conscious literary aesthetic had much in common with the ethos that informed James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His best friend John Dunbar, who’d been at Columbia with him, had survived being shot down by the Germans over Nazi-occupied France, and had published a memorable account of his trek alone over the Pyrenees, found a job teaching English at the California College of Arts and Crafts. His son Robbie, a precocious guitarist with a high school band indebted to the English rock ’n’ roll of the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones, became my best friend. Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish poet whose dissection of the fate of intellectuals under Stalinism, The Captive Mind, was yet another iconoclast, albeit of a different sort. Although Milosz was troubled by what he regarded as the hopeless naiveté of student militants, something in his melancholy temperament found common ground with activists who bemoaned the tragic collision of history with hope. I knew him through his sons, whom I had met in an acting class while we were at Berkeley High School. I was dimly aware that he had written a famous book about the Orwellian world that had so deformed the communist dream. For me, at that time, he was the father we had to beware didn’t catch us smoking pot in the garage of his Grizzly Peak home. To this day, I regret that I didn’t have the wit to enroll in his class on Dostoevsky at Cal. I spent my afternoons delivering the Berkeley Daily Gazette, a right-wing rag, to subscribers living in what is now Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto. On weekends, I hawked Max Scheer’s underground Berkeley Barb along Telegraph Avenue, using my meager profits to buy books I lusted for at Moe’s, Shakespeare’s, and a hole-in-the-wall shambles of a secondhand shop called Creed’s. Whenever I tried to sell books to cigar-chomping Moe Moskowitz, I could count on his rigorous, unsentimental eye to separate wheat from chaff. If he bought more books than he rejected, you felt you’d passed your orals. He was my strictest teacher and the one to whom I owe the most. Steve Wasserman ’74, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is managing director of the New York office of Kneerim & Williams at Fish & Richardson, a literary agency. |
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