NIGHT AT COLUMBIA
217
Time
magazine; who hadn't? But, instead, Ginsberg answered that
he had no philosophy; he spoke of inspiration, or perhaps it was
illumination, ecstatic illumination, as the source of his poetry and
I was more than surprised, I was curiously pleased for him because
I took it as a considerable advance in self-control that he could op–
erate with this much shrewdness and leave it, at least for this occas–
ion, to his audience to abstract a "position" from his and his friends'
antics while he himself moved wild, mild, and innocent through the
jungle of speculation. Back in the older days, it had always been my
feeling that so far as his relationship with his teacher was concerned,
this trying to formulate a philosophy must reveal its falseness even to
himself, so that his recourse to it insulted his intelligence. Two mo–
tives, it seemed to me, impelled him then: the wish to shock his
teacher, and the wish to meet the teacher on equal ground. The first
of these motives was complicated enough, involving as it did the
gratifications of self-incrimination and disapproval, and then forgive–
ness; but the second was more tangled still. To talk with one's Eng–
lish professor who was also a writer, a critic, and one who made no
bones about his solid connection with literary tradition, about one's
descent from Rimbaud, Baudelaire or Dostoevsky was clearly to dem–
onstrate a good-sized rationality and order in what was apparently
an otherwise undisciplined life. Even more, or so I fancied, it was to
propose an alliance between the views of the academic and the poet–
rebel, the unity of a deep discriminating commitment to literature
which must certainly one day wipe out the fortuitous distance between
boy and man, pupil and teacher. Thus, Ginsberg standing on the
platform at Columbia and refusing the philosophy gambit might well
be taken as an impulse toward manhood, or at least manliness, for
which one might
be
grateful.
But I remind myself: Ginsberg at Columbia on Thursday night
was not Ginsberg at Chicago - according to
Time,
at any rate -
or Ginsberg at Hunter either, where Kerouac ran the show and a
dismal show it must have been, with Kerouac drinking on the plat–
form and clapping James Wechsler's hat on his head in a grand pa–
rade of contempt - they were two of four panelists gathered to dis–
cuss, "Is there such a thing as a beat generation?" - and leading
Ginsberg out from the wings like a circus donkey. For whatever reason
- rumor had it he was in a personal crisis - Kerouac didn't appear
