NIGHT AT COLUMBIA
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was intolerant of this much deviation from respectable standards of
behavior. Ten, twelve, fourteen years ago, there was still something
of a challenge in the "conventional" position; I still enjoyed defend–
ing the properties and proprieties of the middle class against friends
who persisted in scorning them. Of course, once upon a time -
but that was in the '30's - one had had to defend even having a
comfortable chair to sit in, or a rug on the floor. But by the '40's
things had changed; one's most intransigent literary friends had ca–
pitulated by then, everybody had a well-upholstered sofa and I was
reduced to such marginal causes as the Metropolitan Museum,
after-dinner coffee cups, and the expectation that visitors would go
home by 2 A.M. and put their ashes in the ashtrays. Then why
should I not also defend the expectation that a student at Columbia,
even a poet, would do his work, submit it to his teachers through the
normal channels of classroom communication, stay out of jail, and
then, if things went right, graduate, staat publishing, be reviewed,
and see what developed, whether he was a success or failure?
Well, for Ginsberg, things didn't go right for quite a while. The
time came when he was graduated from Columbia and published
his poems, but first he got into considerable difficulty, beginning with
his suspension from college and the requirement that he submit to
psychiatric treatment, and terminating - but this was quite a
few years later - in an encounter with the police from which
he was extricated by some of his old teachers who thought he
needed a hospital more than a prison. The suspension had been for a
year, when Ginsberg had been a Senior; the situation was not with–
out its grim humor. It seems that Ginsberg had traced an obscenity
in the dusty windows of Hartley Hall; the words were too shocking
for the Dean of Students to speak, he had written them on a piece
of paper which he pushed across the desk: "F - - - the Jews." Even
the part of Lionel that wanted to laugh couldn't, it was too hard for
the Dean to have to transmit this message to a Jewish professor -
this was still in the '40's when being a Jew in the university was not
yet what it is today. "But he's a Jew himself," said the Dean. "Can
you understand his writing a thing like that?" Yes, Lionel could un–
derstand; but he couldn't explain it to the Dean. And anyway he
knew that the legend in the dust of Hartley Hall required more than
an understanding of Jewish self-hatred and also that it was not the sole
