still known as Samuel Clemens. Nowadays the members are all around sixty, and they actually have an English look to them: maybe they are some of the few Anglo-Saxon descendants in San Francisco. So is San Francisco really a conglomerate of élites? The San Francisco publishing world does mostly numbered editions, The Book Club of California publishes editions of classics like Tallone in Italy, for instance collections of letters by Californians during the Civil War with reproductions of the manuscript letter, a fascinating new way of presenting history books by including exact reproduction of the documents. SFrancisco is the city where you find the typographers used by the New York publishers. Even the Italians, compared to the other Italian communities in America, have all the characteristics of an élite, although my lunch at Il Cenacolo, the Italians’ club, did not suggest a major difference in level from similar locales in New York.
Zellerbach
Near my hotel is the wonderful new skyscraper housing the headquarters of Zellerbach’s paperworks. Z. is from one of the very few Jewish families who lived in SFrancisco before the Gold Rush (1849 is always used as the watershed between California’s prehistory and history), Jews who did not mix with the subsequent waves of Central and Eastern Yiddish immigrants (who in any case are few in Calif.) and they constitute an aristocracy on their own.
Ferlinghetti
Ferlinghetti (who, as you know, is called Ferling and who added that ending out of his admiration for Italians, blacks, and other vital and primitive peoples) is the most intelligent of the beatnik poets (the only one with a sense of humour: his poems are a little like Prévert’s) and he has not left SF for NY. However, at present he is travelling in Chile so I missed the most authoritative guide to the city’s secrets, just as in Chicago I missed out on Algren’s guidance. Ferlinghetti has a bookshop, The City Lights, which is the best bookshop among SFrancisco’s avant-garde. He sells almost entirely paperbacks, as does Discovery, the other literature bookshop in Columbus Ave. The paperback range, however, covers a very broad price band: besides genuinely popular editions (which are almost always only commercial titles) selling at 35 or 50 cents, there is a whole range (vast numbers of books, reflecting an enormous breadth of interest and intelligence in titles) of soft-cover cultural books costing a dollar and a half or 1.75 or even 2 dollars, and which thus come remarkably close to the price for hardback editions which are around 3 dollars. But the paperback public buy paperbacks even if they are dear and would never buy hardback.
The Provinces
Life is not different from life in NY, just as the social make-up of the city is no different. But at parties here you sense something that is the archetypal provincial atmosphere: gossip here is no longer NY gossip, it already has a provincial inflection. This is particularly true of the small world and artificial paradise of the Berkeley professors, each one of whom lives in his little luxury villa: these all form a row along lengthy streets climbing up the mountain. Actually, more than provincial the atmosphere is colonial: we are on the Pacific.
Truth Is Stranger than Fiction
I chose this hotel, after going round seven or eight others, as it was the most suitable in terms of price, cleanliness and location. No one had recommended it to me. Two days later I discover that Ollier, Claus and Meged, three of my fellow grant-receivers, live there, having all arrived at different times: independently of each other, all four of us chose the same hotel from a thousand small hotels of the same type in this area.
The Monument
I always avoid in these notes any description of the landscapes, monuments or tourist trips in the city. But I have to put this one in. Going through a park near the Golden Gate, suddenly you find yourself facing a huge neoclassical construction, all
Zellerbach
Near my hotel is the wonderful new skyscraper housing the headquarters of Zellerbach’s paperworks. Z. is from one of the very few Jewish families who lived in SFrancisco before the Gold Rush (1849 is always used as the watershed between California’s prehistory and history), Jews who did not mix with the subsequent waves of Central and Eastern Yiddish immigrants (who in any case are few in Calif.) and they constitute an aristocracy on their own.
Ferlinghetti
Ferlinghetti (who, as you know, is called Ferling and who added that ending out of his admiration for Italians, blacks, and other vital and primitive peoples) is the most intelligent of the beatnik poets (the only one with a sense of humour: his poems are a little like Prévert’s) and he has not left SF for NY. However, at present he is travelling in Chile so I missed the most authoritative guide to the city’s secrets, just as in Chicago I missed out on Algren’s guidance. Ferlinghetti has a bookshop, The City Lights, which is the best bookshop among SFrancisco’s avant-garde. He sells almost entirely paperbacks, as does Discovery, the other literature bookshop in Columbus Ave. The paperback range, however, covers a very broad price band: besides genuinely popular editions (which are almost always only commercial titles) selling at 35 or 50 cents, there is a whole range (vast numbers of books, reflecting an enormous breadth of interest and intelligence in titles) of soft-cover cultural books costing a dollar and a half or 1.75 or even 2 dollars, and which thus come remarkably close to the price for hardback editions which are around 3 dollars. But the paperback public buy paperbacks even if they are dear and would never buy hardback.
The Provinces
Life is not different from life in NY, just as the social make-up of the city is no different. But at parties here you sense something that is the archetypal provincial atmosphere: gossip here is no longer NY gossip, it already has a provincial inflection. This is particularly true of the small world and artificial paradise of the Berkeley professors, each one of whom lives in his little luxury villa: these all form a row along lengthy streets climbing up the mountain. Actually, more than provincial the atmosphere is colonial: we are on the Pacific.
Truth Is Stranger than Fiction
I chose this hotel, after going round seven or eight others, as it was the most suitable in terms of price, cleanliness and location. No one had recommended it to me. Two days later I discover that Ollier, Claus and Meged, three of my fellow grant-receivers, live there, having all arrived at different times: independently of each other, all four of us chose the same hotel from a thousand small hotels of the same type in this area.
The Monument
I always avoid in these notes any description of the landscapes, monuments or tourist trips in the city. But I have to put this one in. Going through a park near the Golden Gate, suddenly you find yourself facing a huge neoclassical construction, all
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