NIGHT AT COLUMBIA
219
biguous need to tell his teacher exactly what new flagrancy he was
now exploring with his Gide-talking friends at the West End Cafe had
at any rate the distinction of being more crudely justified in his emo–
tional disturbance than most; he also had the distinction of carrying
mental unbalance in the direction of criminality, a territory one
preferred to leave unclaimed by student or friend.
Gide and the West End Cafe in
all
its upper-Broadway dreari–
ness: what could the two conceivably have in common except those
lost boys of the '40's? How different it might have been for Gins–
berg and his friends if they had come of age ten or fifteen years
sooner was one of the particular sadnesses of the other evening, it
virtually stood on the platform with them as the poets read their
poems whose chief virtue, it seemed to me, was their "racial-minority"
funniness, their "depressed-classes" funniness of a kind which has
never had so sure and live a place as it did in the '30's, the embittered
fond funniness which has to do with one's own awful family, funni–
ness plain and poetical, always aware of itself, of a kind which would
seem now to have all but disappeared among intellectuals except as
an eclecticism or a device of self-pity. It's a real loss; I hadn't quite
realized how much I missed it until Thursday night when Ginsberg
read his poem, "The Ignu," and Corso read his poem, "Marriage"
(a compulsive poem, he called it, about a compulsive subject) and
they were still funny in that old racial depressed way but not nearly
as funny and authentic as they would have been had they been
written before the Jews and the Italians and the Negroes, but espec–
ially the Jews, had been crammed down their own and everyone else's
throat as Americans-like-everyone-else instead of outsiders raised in
the Bronx or on Ninth Avenue or even in Georgia. The Jew in par–
ticular is a loss to literature and life - I mean the Jew out of which
was bred the Jewish intellectual of the '30's. For a few short years in
the '30's, as not before or since, the Jew was at his funniest, wisest
best; he perfectly well knew the advantage he could count on in the
Gentile world, and that there was no ascendancy or pride the Gen–
tile comrades could muster against a roomful of Jewish sympathizers
singing at the tops of their voices, "A SOCialist union is a NO good
union, is a COM-pan-y union of the bosses," or against Michael
Gold's mother who wanted to know did her boy have to write books
the whole world should know she had bedbugs.
If
Ginsberg had
