Telegraph Avenue in its glory days

Berkeley, a tiny island in the stream, the brightest jewel in the crown that is California, the Mecca of the West for the intellectual few, Berkeley, my home.

What a colorful contrast it is to all the cities and towns around it, as if they were inhabited by the walking dead and it was the last enclave of human beings, a small splash of colors on a large gray canvas.  Now San Francisco across the waters has its own color and character and verve and vibrancy.  But for pure intellectual life and mental stimulation, Berkeley is the place, the oasis in the desert.

This would be the first of three returns I would make there over the next five years, like a love affair.  The last would span seven years, after which I would leave it, and the bloom of my youth, forever.

Deirdre only stayed one full day in Berkeley.  We found my friend Phil O’Keefe’s apartment and rested up.  The following morning I showed her Telegraph avenue with its gypsy-like vendors and the university.  By early afternoon she was packed up and set out alone for L.A.  Whatever became of her, I could only wonder.  Even Dennis, who introduced us in Toronto, had lost all touch with her when I met him again two years later.

My first and best memory of Deirdre

I was back in my element again. Intellectuals, rebels, professors, students and some of the best bookshops in the world filled the streets. It’s as if you breathed in knowledge and intelligence in that atmosphere. Here’s just one example out of a thousand I experienced. I met Paddy, an Irishman ten years older than me in an Irish pub called the ‘Starry Plough’ where I had the good fortune to live, (above it) for six months. It was filled with eccentrics but many of them so wise in different fields, just sipping one beer at the bar each day would be a deep education, equal to any classroom.

Here's an entry from one of my journals started a few years later. Though I started keeping a regular diary in 1980, when I returned to Berkeley two years later it really took off in volume, all because of the mental stimulation and conversations like these:

In a conversation with Patrick the bookbinder (and others) a week ago, at Kip’s’ over many pitchers of beer, I heard from him the most succinct explanation of Berkeley’s particular drawing force over other towns. “In hardly any other town in the world are there places to publicly enjoy leisure. In all mercantile cities the inhabitants teem to factories in the mornings and to their ugly dens at night. What restaurants there are, or bars, serve up food impersonally. The vulgarity of their lives is too deep to allow for much socializing. It allows for no intelligent conversation. Fears, envies, hatreds, spites, disgusts fill up their little craniums. Only old, instituted churches or moronic bowling alleys become public resorts. If there is a town park, it is filled with old, speechless dotards, and a deep sense of loneliness descends like a fog upon the unfortunate youth of talent who stays in this wasteland. There will only be more than a few stray artists in places where there are spots for the artistically inclined to lounge in and meet and communicate their enthusiasms. Of the hundreds of cities on this continent, I estimate there are perhaps ten fit for an artist to thrive in, where he will not feel like some monster.”

Such was the eloquence that filled one’s ears at every corner. I love Berkeley. I lived there the next twelve years with no connection to the University, profiting just as much in learning as if I had been connected. My work, my wife and family, finally drew me away. But maybe now in old age and no responsibilities, I’ll return.

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