“What did the FBI agents look like?” I asked, never having seen one. Everybody in Berkeley was scared of just such a visit as Nicholas had received, myself included. It was the times.
“They have fat red necks and double chins. And little eyes, like two coals stuck into dough. And they watch you all the time. They never take their eyes off you. They had faint but detectable southern accents. They said they’d be back to talk to both of us. They’ll probably be by to talk to you too. About your writing. Are your stories left-wing?”
I asked, “Haven’t you read them?”
“I don’t read science fiction,” Nicholas said. “I just read serious writers like Proust and Joyce and Kafka. When science fiction has something serious to say, I’ll read it.” He began, then, to talk up the virtues of Finnegans Wake, in particular the final part, which he compared to the final part of Ulysses. It was his belief that no one but himself had either read it or understood it.
“Science fiction is the literature of the future,” I told him, when he paused. “In a few decades they’ll be visiting the moon.”
“Oh, no,” Nicholas said vigorously. “They’ll never visit the moon. You’re living in a fantasy world.”
“Is that what your future self told you?” I said. “Or your self from another universe, whatever it was?”
It seemed to me that it was Nicholas who was living in a fantasy world, working in the record store as a clerk, meanwhile always lost in great literature of a sort divorced from his own reality. He had read so much James Joyce that Dublin was more real to him than Berkeley. And yet even to me Berkeley was not quite real but lost, as Nicholas was, in fantasy; all of Berkeley dreamed a political dream separate from the rest of America, a dream soon to be crushed, as reaction flowed deeper and deeper and spread out wider. A person like Nicholas Brady could never go to Alaska; he was a product of Berkeley and could only survive in the radical student milieu of Berkeley. What did he know of the rest of the United States? I had driven across the country; I had visited Kansas and Utah and Kentucky, and I knew the isolation of the Berkeley radicals. They might affect America a little with their views, but in the long run it would be solid conservative America, the Midwest, which would win out. And when Berkeley fell, Nicholas Brady would fall with it.
Of course this was a long time ago, before President Kennedy was assassinated, before President Ferris Fremont and the New American Way. Before the darkness closed over us completely.
3
Being politically oriented, Nicholas had already noted the budding career of the junior senator from California, Ferris F. Fremont, who had issued forth in 1952 from Orange County, far to the south of us, an area so reactionary that to us in Berkeley it seemed a phantom land, made of the mists of dire nightmare, where apparitions spawned that were as terrible as they were real—more real than if they had been composed of solid reality. Orange County, which no one in Berkeley had ever actually seen, was the fantasy at the other end of the world, Berkeley’s opposite; if Berkeley lay in the thrall of illusion, of detachment from reality, it was Orange County which had pushed it there. Within one universe the two could never coexist.
It was as if Ferris Fremont stood amid the deserts of Orange County and imagined, at the north end of the state, the unreal thralldom of Berkeley and shuddered and said to himself something on the order of That must go. If the two men, Nicholas Brady in the north and Ferris Fremont in the south, could have looked across the six-hundred-mile distance between them and confronted each other, both would have been appalled, Ferris Fremont as much so as Nicholas Brady, who was already appalled as he read in the Berkeley Daily Gazette about the rise to political power of the publisher from Oceanside who had gotten his chance in the Senate by defaming his Democratic rival, Margaret Burger Greyson, as a homosexual.
As a matter of record, Margaret Burger Greyson was a routine senator, but the defamatory charges had formed the basis of Fremont’s victory, not her voting record. Fremont had used his newspaper in Oceanside to blast Mrs. Greyson, and, financed by unknown sources, he had plastered the southern part of the state with billboards darkly alluding to Mrs. Greyson’s sex life.
CALIFORNIA NEEDS A STRAIGHT CANDIDATE!
DON’T YOU THINK THERE’S SOMETHING QUEER ABOUT GREYSON?
That kind of thing. It was based on a supposedly actual incident in Mrs. Greyson’s life, but no one really knew. Mrs. Greyson fought back but never sued. After her defeat she vanished into obscurity, or maybe, as Republicans joked, into the gay bars of San Diego. Mrs. Greyson, needless to say, had been a liberal. In the McCarthy days there wasn’t that
