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PARTISAN REVIEW
on Thursday night, and Ginsberg at Columbia was Ginsberg his own
man, dealing with his own history, and intent, it seemed to me, on
showing up the past for the poor inaccurate thing it so often is: it's
a chance we all dream of but mostly it works the other way around,
like the long-ago story of Jed Harris coming back to Yale and sitting
on the fence weeping for a youth he could never re-write no matter
how many plays of Chekhov he brought to Broadway, no matter
how much money he made. I suppose I have no right to say now,
and on such early and little evidence, that Ginsberg had always
desperately wanted to be respectable, or respected, like his instructors
at Columbia, it is so likely that this is a hindsight which suits my
needs. It struck me, though, that this was the most unmistakable and
touching message from platform to audience the other night, and as
I received it, I felt I had known something like it all along. Not that
Ginsberg had ever shown himself as a potential future colleague in
the university; anything but that. Even the implied literary comrade–
ship had had reference, not to any possibility of Ginsberg's assimila–
tion into the community of professors, but to the professor's capacity
for association in the community of rebellious young poets. Still, it
was not just anyone on the campus to whom Ginsberg had come with
his lurid boasts which were
also
his confession; it was Lionel, it was
Mark Van Doren; if there was anyone else he would very likely be
of the same respectable species, and I remember saying, "He wants
you to forbid him to behave like that. He wants you to take him out
of it, else why does he choose people like you and Mark to tell
these stories to?" To which I received always the same answer, "I'm
not
his
father," with which there could of course be no argument.
And yet, even granting the accuracy of this reconstruction of the
past, it would be wrong to conclude that any consideration of motive
on Ginsberg's part was sufficiently strong to alter one's first and most
forceful image of Ginsberg as a "case" - a gifted and sad case, a
guilt-provoking and nuisance case but, above all, a case. Nor was
it a help that Lionel had recently published a story about a crazy stu–
dent and a supposedly normal student in which the author's affec–
tion was so plainly directed to the former; we never became used to
the calls, often in the middle of the night, asking whether it wasn't the
crazy character who was really sane. Ginsberg, with his poems in which
there was never quite enough talent or hard work, and with his am-
