Diana Trilling
THE OTHER NIGHT AT COLUMBIA:
A REPORT FROM THE ACADEMY
The "beats" were to read their poetry at Columbia on
Thursday evening and on the spur of the moment three wives from
the English department had decided to go to hear them. But for me,
one of the three, the spur of the moment was not where the story had
begun. It had begun much farther back, some twelve or fourteen
years ago, when Allen Ginsberg had been a student at Columbia
and I had heard about him much more than I usually hear of students
for the simple reason that he got into a great deal of trouble which
involved his instructors, and had to be rescued and revived and re–
stored; eventually he had even to be kept out of jail. Of course there
was always the question, should this young man be rescued, should
he be restored? There was even the question, shouldn't he go to jail?
We argued about it some at home but the discussion, I'm afraid, was
academic, despite myoid resistance to the idea that people like Gins–
berg had the right to ask and receive preferential treatment just be–
cause they read Rimbaud and Gide and undertook to put words on
paper themselves. Nor was my principle (if one may call it that) of
equal responsibility for poets and shoe clerks so firm that I didn't
need to protect it by refusing to confront Ginsberg as an individual
or potential acquaintance. I don't mean that I was aware, at the
time, of this motive for disappearing on the two or three occasions
when he came to the house to deliver a new batch of poems and
report on his latest adventures in sensation-seeking.
If
I'd been asked
to explain, then, my wish not to meet and talk with this troublesome
young man who had managed to break through the barrier of student
anonymity, I suppose I'd have rested with the proposition that I
don't like mess, and I'd have been ready to defend myself against the
charge, made in the name of
art,
of a strictness of judgment which
