ABSTRACT
For a term beginning early in February 1960 Berryman became a visiting professor in the Department of Speech at the University of California at Berkeley. He took an apartment at 2525 Durant Avenue, a bright, freshly decorated place only three blocks from work and a short walk from the beer taverns on Telegraph Avenue. Some friends took him out for a Chinese meal on his arrival, but after that excursion he found himself isolated for days on end, a situation guaranteed (as he confessed) to intensify what he called his ‘flowing paranoia’. Poorly with a throat infection, he wrote that it ‘has been infinitely beyond anything I ever suffered before, I’ve had to give up smoking almost completely, & live on honey in milk. I get hungry but my throat does not. If it doesn’t improve, I’m going to have my throat removed.’ Scheduled to teach five days a week, he gagged through his first classes, was recommended to the hospital, and went to a movie after some three days but had to leave half-way through, when strangers started to pass him lozenges for his coughing. He found a certain consolation in book-buying, for the stores in Berkeley were primed with alluring bargains, but otherwise he stared enviously from the hill out towards Alcatraz Island. He put his apartment in order, and composed himself wittily to his continuing solitude: ‘This could go on too long! Wow! I took no vows, after all: what gives? Has Henry entered on his destined role, pariah?… Perhaps I am a hopeless bore, whom everybody has caught on to??’ Joking apart, however, the wryness of his position led him to sleep erratically and to gloom. Some weeks later, in fact, after he had partly assuaged his loneliness, he even admitted to having urinated once in his bed.
