Not long before she died, the mother of poet and art critic Bill Berkson made an effort to better understand her son, despite the fact that it seemed “very late in the getting-to-know-you game.” “Well,” she told him, “you’ve had an interesting life.” She wasn’t wrong. As this captivating memoir displays in spades, Berkson crossed paths with a remarkable roster of writers, artists, and other famous and creative people, as he moved from his high society, Upper East Side upbringing, to the smoky bohemian Greenwich Village poetry-jazz-art scene, to the far-out hippie reaches of northern California in the late 1960s and 1970s, and beyond. Perhaps best known as one of Frank O’Hara’s close friends and collaborators, Berkson was also a prolific poet and art critic, and a central figure in the New York School of poetry’s second generation – an increasingly influential group consisting of poets like Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Joe Brainard.
When Berkson passed away in 2016, he left behind this “all-but-completed” collection of prose pieces about his life, his friends, and his artistic heroes, which has now been gathered in book form as Since When: A Memoir in Pieces. It’s a pity Berkson didn’t live to see the publication of this handsomely produced and substantial book, which features some of his most charming and accessible writing. Although it is hardly a conventional memoir, the book does lead off with one, a straightforward 45-page autobiography. The rest of the unusually structured book, however, is filled with bits and pieces which vary a good deal in form and approach.
As if to suggest that the chronicle which opens the book is insufficient to capture a life, Since When goes on to offer a diverse collection of “memory snippets”: short “Personal Portraits” of friends and fellow artists, entries lifted from Berkson’s diary, letters he wrote to various people, several interviews he gave, pages taken from a 1961 datebook (“Drinks with Frank / tropical garden”; “Dinner Barbara Guest”; “during lunch at Joan’s, Frank pronounces Ashbery ‘the foremost poet in English today’”), and even a letter Berkson’s mother sent him about their family history. The fact that the book is such a miscellany, culled from a variety of different sources and settings, doesn’t detract from its richness; instead, it gives the book a pleasing variety and prismatic feel, with some stories from his past even coming up in more than one piece, told differently each time. As a whole, this scrapbook format seems to suggest that the poet’s life – any life – cannot be crammed into a cohesive single narrative but is rather always and forever “in pieces,” best thought of as collage that gives us glimpses, but never the totality, of a person and their life and times.
Berkson hailed from a rather aristocratic Manhattan milieu that stands in stark contrast to the much more modest, unsophisticated backgrounds of other New York School poets like O’Hara, Ashbery, Berrigan, and Notley, who all grew up in middle- or working-class families far from the metropole. With his movie-star good looks, clean-cut, athletic bearing, and distinguished family lineage, Berkson seemed like someone the word “scion” was coined to describe. His father Seymour was a powerful newspaper publisher who climbed his way to the top of the Hearst corporation, and his mother Eleanor Lambert was a renowned fashion publicist (whose 2003 New York Times obituary, incidentally, was longer than her son’s). Berkson recalls the rarefied world of his childhood, which he spent in a vast 5thAvenue apartment with sweeping views over Central Park. As Berkson recalls, “in the postwar years, our house regularly filled with spirited smart-set Manhattanites – parties that mixed people from show business, journalism, and the fashion world.” Young Bill got to know A-list family friends like Judy Garland, who makes recurring appearances here, along with “her daughter Liza” (that would be Liza Minnelli) who “was living at my mother’s and beginning to break into show business.”
After high school at the tony prep school Lawrenceville, Berkson attended college at Brown University, where he remembers being jolted awake by the Beats and the avant-garde. After getting word of his father’s sudden death by heart attack, though, he abruptly left Providence and ended up back in New York where, before long, he was earning what one might think of as an unofficial MFA from the “New York School” before there even was such a label, with a minor in “Frank O’Hara.” His matriculation began fortuitously when he landed in a poetry workshop taught by Kenneth Koch at the New School, an experience which seemed to change the direction of Berkson’s life. Koch quickly recognized a star disciple in the making and introduced him to O’Hara and the rest of the gang. One day after class in May 1959, Koch invited Berkson to a party at the painter Jane Freilicher’s apartment, where he would be able to meet O’Hara, but added a warning that would prove prophetic: “Frank will become a germ in your life.”
The two soon became inseparable: going to the ballet, watching movies on TV, meeting for boozy meals during O’Hara’s lunch break from the Museum of Modern Art (where he was a curator, and where Berkson would also soon be employed), traveling together in Europe, and collaborating on a series of poems. “Frank and I charmed each other,” he writes. “I myself got dizzy in his regard and attentiveness.” Berkson acknowledges the pair’s ostentatious affection and closeness were not without costs: “Almost all of Frank’s old friends disapproved of, or at least were bemused by, our behavior.” Nevertheless, it was a heady and formative time for Berkson: “To him I owe my general cultural education of that period, as well as a great deal of useful knowledge about life and manners.” In his own poetry, he began to forge a synthesis of his New York School influences ( “I wrote poems mixing up Ashbery’s insouciant rhetoric with O’Hara’s passion and irritability”) that pushed the group’s aesthetics in new directions.
Many pieces in Since When provide a welcome portal into an easy-to-romanticize, but genuinely thrilling time and place: the New York art and literary world of the late 1950s and early 1960s. This moment — of exciting cultural ferment and inter-art dialogue between poetry, painting, music, dance, and film — was also, Berkson notes, “an era of great parties.” In one amusing, enlightening passage, he stops to give a catalog of the best parties of the early sixties. Berkson compares the downtown soirées hosted by friends like Fairfield Porter or Kenward Elmslie (“talks in groups of two, three, five; dancing to jazz records, impromptu theatrics,” Kenneth Koch singing witty blues parodies) with parties thrown by resident wild man Larry Rivers (more jazz musicians and women, “more frantic, frontal, beat, no less nuanced”), further contrasting both kinds of get-togethers with the staid uptown parties held by more famous Abstract Expressionist painters, which featured luminaries like Ralph Ellison, Hannah Arendt, Clement Greenberg, and Walker Evans, and were “interesting but not much fun.”
As the 1960s wore on, Berkson grew close with the poets of the New York School’s second generation – some of whom, like Bernadette Mayer, were originally his students in the poetry workshop he taught at the New School. (Among the students he casually mentions in a long list of people who “came and went” is a young poet named Patti Smith!). Just at the moment the New York poetry world was reaching an exhilarating peak in the late 1960s as the scene coalesced around the Poetry Project at St. Marks, Berkson made a sudden left turn, said goodbye to all that, and departed New York for northern California. He spent the next nine years living in the isolated bohemian enclave of Bolinas, which became a west coast outpost of the New York School – an idyll brimming with poetry, collaboration, psychedelic drugs, and hippie excess, which Berkson conjures here with a mix of nostalgia and unsentimental critique. He spent the rest of his life in San Francisco, making a career as a poet, art critic, and professor at the San Francisco Art Institute.
In its rather charmingly haphazard fashion, the book offers vivid snapshots of an array of famous friends and mentors. In addition to affectionate portraits of mentor-friends like Koch and O’Hara, there are lively, indelible entries on poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Philip Whalen, Ted Berrigan, Jim Carroll, and Amiri Baraka, the painters Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, the composers John Cage and Morton Feldman, and many more. It quickly becomes apparent how easily Berkson could move back and forth between realms – between the cultural upper-crust and its druggy margins, between high art and low, a tendency Berkson took pride in from the first, as can be seen in the caption beneath his high school yearbook picture: “Plato or comic books, I’m versatile.”
That versatility lends this memoir a funny, almost Zelig-like quality, as Berkson seems to pop up everywhere and cross paths with everyone. In a great short piece titled “My Generation,” he observes that “I am almost certainly the only person who was at both the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969 and Truman Capote’s Black and White Masked Ball in 1969.” The piece is accompanied by two of the book’s many interesting photographs: in one, Berkson – like an avant-garde Forrest Gump – can be seen standing half-visible behind Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow at Capote’s socialite “party of the century,” while in the other we see him sitting in the mud on the edge of a bunch of ragged, mesmerized hippies at Woodstock. These strange juxtapositions and amusing brushes with fame crop up again and again, as in the passage where he recalls an evening chez Koch when he barely escaped Norman Mailer delivering a karate chop to his neck, the night before the notorious incident in which the novelist stabbed his wife. Or the passage in which Berkson describes an awkward, sexually unsatisfying tryst with none other than “T.L., the well-known television and movie actress, far out of my league,” which seems to be a reference to Tina Louise, the actress who played the bombshell Ginger on Gilligan’s Island.
Whether meeting an elderly, nearly silent Ezra Pound in Italy in 1965 or attending a Byrds concert with Ted Berrigan at the Fillmore East — Berkson was there. Only he could compose a sentence like this one, about the notorious scene at Andy Warhol’s: “the one Factory party I went to was Judy Garland’s idea.” Or include a journal entry from 1967 about “waking up with Bianca (she’s been living here about a month, mostly nights”) without letting you know it’s Bianca Jagger he’s talking about sleeping with. Just when you think you’ve seen it all – he and Frank O’Hara actually chatted with Marlene Dietrich in a club? he hitchhiked with Peter Yarrow of “Peter, Paul and Mary” fame? — you find out he also got to know Marcel Proust’s housekeeper and chauffeur while staying in Paris. Proust’s housekeeper!
This is all great fun. But it would be wrong to give the impression that Berkson was a hanger-on, or a bit player at the margins of greater people’s stories – far from it. He was an innovative poet and art critic in his own right, and a crucial perpetuator of the history and aesthetics of the New York School of poetry. He also had the good fortune, and the good sense, to find himself in dialogue with some of the most inspiring figures of his time, at the heart of a fascinating cultural mix, from which he imbibed deeply and to which he contributed his own lasting poems and books. Fortunately, he also left behind this unusual work – both a valuable cultural history and a wonderfully appealing mosaic of an autobiography.
[Published November 6, 2018 by Coffee House Press, 280 pages, $17.95 paperback]