How much time one can spend in art galleries, reading poems, watching films—especially Western ones—and see so few renderings of something quite simple. The artist’s child. Let alone the artist’s family. In the 17th century, Rembrandt painted his wife, Saskia, in The Prodigal Son in the Tavern, but it was not until 1789 that we saw a painting quite like Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s Self-Portrait with Julie. Le Brun had been making her living portraying aristocrats with their children, as was the fashion at the time, but suddenly, there she was, resplendently, with her own child.
It’s hard not to mourn this impoverishment within Western art—and to imagine how different our culture would look if some elements or traces that one finds in places like the prehistoric cave paintings at Rouffignac (where there are the obvious brushstrokes of children on the walls) or the tomb paintings of the New Kingdom in Egypt, wherein one finds whole families, had shaped it more. What if the artist had not always been assumed to be apart, but rather always within, enmeshed, part of the group? Seen and seeing, making and making a home. What if the domestic was in the studio, as important as the nobles or wealthy or notable, who paid to have their portraits made?
American art—because it is also fundamentally Native and African—has within its roots and recent greats an answer to this question. You can see its alternative to the artist apart blooming within the enlarging possibilities of the great Harlem-born artist Faith Ringgold, whose family is both the fabric and weave of her work. How moving it is to see in her quilts and soft sculptures her great-great-grandmother Susie Shannon, who was born into slavery and required to make quilts but who also spent her later years quilting. Or to see in Echoes of Harlem, made the year before Ringgold’s mother’s death, a collaboration between mother and daughter—as if a passing of the form.
In many ways, Tosh Berman’s sun-dappled memoir of growing up the child of Wallace Berman has a distant kinship to Ringgold’s work and its cycles. Born in 1954 and raised in the ’60s and ’70s in Southern California as the son of Shirley and Wallace Berman, the latter of whom would go on to become one of the most influential California artists of the postwar period, Tosh has written a book that feels as much a classic child-of-the-artist memoir as a continuation of Wallace’s project, which was cut short by a car accident that killed him on his 50th birthday.
Wallace’s collages, with their repeated images and sand-blasted mimeographed quality, would prefigure a world of memes, of reproductions that eroded the value of the real. Their scuffed surfaces have the feel of a concert poster dissolved by weather and rain. Their images—borrowed heavily from mass culture—warn of the alienation of a life spent oriented to images of advertising, of commerce. But they are warmer than that interpretation alone; they are also more curious and coded than pop art—such as that of Warhol and Rauschenberg. The original meaning of the images he sampled seems to seep away on many occasions, all the more uncanny when he is using a language, as he did with Hebrew lettering. Approach one of his artworks today in the flesh and it feels like a relic of an age of commodification, but with the mysterious hidden messages of art made by hand.
Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World, his son’s memoir, feels at times like a book written in homage to Wallace’s style, a book in which fragments of time are assembled as a mosaic of the past, the bold-faced names of Wallace’s famous friends and neighbors in Topanga Canyon—from the child actor Russ Tamblyn to Neil Young to Allen Ginsberg—appearing and reappearing, somewhat flattened by their own fame. Mick Jagger tousles the author’s head and says, “Cute tyke”; figures like Merce Cunningham appear in the peripheral vision of party scenes like ghosts.
If this was all Tosh was, however, we wouldn’t be reading it today—or at all. It’s the way this intimate, melancholic, and disarmingly frank book layers time and story that allows it to re-create what John Ashbery called “the experience of experience.” Using short, simple sentences, a direct approach to family stories—Tosh begins with his grandparents’ lives, as recent émigrés from Europe—the book establishes love and childhood as a baseline. The artist is not a colossus. He is a father who makes terrible egg sandwiches, takes his son to concerts, and shows signs of strain around his family. He is a husband who, controllingly, won’t allow his wife to keep a diary.
Pointing his narrative at this domestic space, doubling back to his father’s own development as an artist, Tosh builds a portrait of the life of an artist’s son. He is an only child, with two living grandmothers, one of whom speaks Yiddish and takes him to Los Angeles’s Fairfax district at Third Street, the other of whom allows him to watch astonishing amounts of television. Yes, he describes things only a bohemian family might do or be part of: A friend turns up with a pet lion that tackles young Tosh. The Bermans teach him his first words by teaching him to say the poet Verlaine’s name. At night, he falls asleep to the flickering light of Jean Cocteau films.
But he is also simply a kid—a kid who loves James Bond films and Hardy Boys books, a kid who gets vertigo on staircases, a kid who loves his beautiful mother and appreciates her attention when she comes home from work, labor that pays for the freedom her husband uses to make art. Wallace would also use this liberty to found and distribute (for free) his famous journal, Semina, which published the work of Hermann Hesse, the poems of Philip Lamantia, and photographs he took of his wife and child, shots that Tosh gives the backstory to in his memoir.
In a time when it’s clearer than ever that capitalism, unchecked, will destroy the world, Tosh presents an appealing but realistic portrait of life in a society run on barter, mutual aid, and light hustle. Wallace never put anything in his own name, and often paid for groceries with his artwork, and refused to show at galleries. Semina was sold just once, at City Lights, for $1, where, as a child, Tosh would discover his pleasure in the printed object. Otherwise, Wallace gave the journal away, mailed it to people, building a community through what Lewis Hyde has called the gift economy, decades before it could be labeled as such.
Tosh is the story of how this childhood made a life. Tosh grows up somewhat wild but almost more responsible than his parents. He doesn’t smoke weed; he is all exposed feeling; he knows to treat girls well and be polite. He never gets a lesson on how to make egg sandwiches, but that sounds like a good thing.
Cooking aside, Wallace, to hear his son describe it, was something of a homebody, and so this memoir fittingly is a story of addresses. What a glorious tour through a lost time of Los Angeles the book is, simply on that level. The family’s first home was merely a shack on stilts at 1548 Crater Lane in Beverly Glen, the first of several homes the Bermans would occupy in the area—including one that would be lost in a mudslide.
Precarity loomed, often thanks to principles. Wallace’s first and last official commercial gallery show would take place in 1957, a bit of a disaster in which the police are called—Tosh suspects a publicity-hungry gallerist, also an artist—and his work is cited as a crime against decency. The family flees to San Francisco for a two-story spot at 707 Scott Street, where among the figures floating in and out of Tosh’s parents’ life are the poets Robert Duncan and John Weiners, the latter of whom is a tenant in the flat upstairs from them.
As we move forward in time, we sometimes move back. Tosh, we learn, was named after a friend his father met during World War II, possibly during a period after a mental breakdown his father experienced in the wake of a terrible naval assignment: blowing up schools of dolphins who were too keenly following and cracking U.S. sonar. Tosh describes how this fragile, broken man scissored his way into postwar Los Angeles and into the low life where jazz, drugs, and hustlers intersected. When Wallace meets Shirley, he gets a reprieve from scuzziness.
Tosh narrates his father’s life with a loose, conversational style, parsing legend from fact. His prose sounds spoken, trustworthy, and full of aphoristic self-knowledge. Describing life in Larkspur, where the family decamps in the 1960s and where Tosh fails kindergarten, he writes: “What school taught me was the feeling of being an outsider.” As the book goes along, an uncanny feeling grows as photographs of young Tosh sit side by side with his story of growing up and a steady stream of images of his father’s artwork. Which is the record of the time and Wallace Berman’s life? The art or the child and family? Tosh, in its own gentle way, argues that both are.
The family returns to Beverly Glen eventually, and Tosh enters school properly. He is enrolled in special education classes alongside Japanese American kids. While his father’s practice grows, and the house becomes thick with marijuana smoke, band members, and grown-up former child actors, Tosh carries on having a childhood. He reads comics. His father encourages his own friends to make art, like Dean Stockwell, to essentially reclaim the childhood they lost on-screen.
It’s hard to read this book and not mourn the intermingling of musical, visual, and literary arts so evident in these pages. The great socialist poet Jack Hirschman was a friend of Tamblyn’s, and Dennis Hopper was a collector of quite a few people’s work, not to mention a photographer in his own right, and a screenwriter and an actor. And a maniac. Tosh’s father’s face winds up on the cover of the Beatles’ famous 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, alongside Terry Southern, Mae West, and Carl Jung, among others. Berman gets a big grant to make art, and he spends it on a trip to London for the family. They head out to Chalk Farm for a conference to hear Ginsberg, who is appearing alongside Stokely Carmichael, Herbert Marcuse, and R.D. Laing. On their way home, they offer a ride in their taxi to an older besuited man leaving at the same time: William S. Burroughs.
At times, it’s not hard to think: Tosh Berman was born in the right place at the right time. When Hopper, a family friend, starts shooting Easy Rider, Tosh is briefly roped into a scene, but then the scene is dropped when Tosh finds the acting too stressful. Later, he goes to high school with Maureen McCormick, who played Marsha on The Brady Bunch. Father and son bond over music, going to concerts by David Bowie and the Rolling Stones, whom they knew from the beginning. “Often when you see a famous person in person, you notice the difference between the image and the real person,” Tosh writes of Brian Jones. “With Brian, there was no difference.”
One reads this book waiting for something terrible to happen. “Guns and Pete Seeger were a very strange combination,” Tosh remembers of one neighbor in Topanga Canyon, a Seeger fan and heroin addict and gun enthusiast. It doesn’t—at least not in the way one imagines it might. Despite some lax parenting, Tosh grows up happy, anxious, loved, and lucky in that love, and then is devastated by his father’s sudden death. On that day, his adult life begins.
What a tender book this is in how it restores what was missing from Wallace’s work to the record. The memories and moments are not put back as a correction, but as a continuation of Wallace’s life. Here is an “electric scent,” the smell of a television, opened up from the back by Tosh’s uncle Dave. Here is the feeling of being squeezed into the front seat of the family’s Datsun pickup to go to the store. Here is a houseguest turning up and speaking only Middle English at dinner, and everyone talking back to him in turn as if nothing were the matter. They even drove him to the local bus stop and then checked up on the man, only to find him gone. If only all artists could be so open with their life as this one, the writer Tosh Berman.•
The event with Tosh Berman on January 15 has been canceled due to illness. Please join us on February 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when author Greg Sarris will sit down with a special guest and host John Freeman to discuss Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
