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cause for administrative uneasiness about Ginsberg and his cronies.
It was ordinary good sense for the college to take therapeutic meas–
ures with Ginsberg.
I now realize that even at this early point in his career I had
already accumulated a fund of information about young Ginsberg
which accurately forecast his present talent for self-promotion al–
though it was surely disproportionate to the place he commanded in
his teacher's mind and quite contradicted the uncertain physical im–
pression I had caught in opening the door to him when he came
to the apartment. He was middling tall, slight, dark, sallow;
his
dress suggested shabby gentility, poor brown tweed gone threadbare
and yellow. The description would have fitted any number of under–
graduates of his or any Columbia generation; it was the personal
story that set him acutely apart. He came from New Jersey where his
father was a school teacher, or perhaps a principal, who himself wrote
poetry too - I think for the
New York Times,
which would
be
as
good a way as any of defining the separation between father and son.
His mother was in a mental institution, and, off and on, she had been
there for a long time. This was the central and utterly persuasive fact
of this young man's life; I knew this before I was told it in poetry at
Columbia the other night, and doubtless it was this knowledge that
underlay the nervous irritability with which I responded to so much
as the mention of Ginsberg's name. Here was a boy to whom an out–
rageous injustice had been done: his mother had gone mad on
him,
and now whoever crossed his path became somehow responsible,
guilty, caught in the impossibility of rectifying what she had done. It
was an unfair burden to put on those who were only the later acci–
dents of his history and it made me more defensive than charitable
with this poor object of her failure. No boy, after all, could ask anyone
to help
him
build a career on the terrible but gratuitous circumstance
of a mad mother; it was a justification for neither poetry nor prose
nor yet for "philosophy" of the kind young Ginsberg liked to expound
to his teacher. In the question period which followed the poetry-read–
ing the other night at Columbia, this matter of a rationale for the
behavior of Ginsberg and his friends came up: someone asked Gins–
berg to state his philosophy. It was a moment I had been awaiting and
I thought: "Here we go; he'll tell us how he's crazy like a daisy and
how his friend Orlovsky is cr.azy like a butterfly." I had been reading
