NIGHT AT
COLUMBIA
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between the "beats" and my friends who would caution us against
them. Taste or style dictates that most intellectuals behave decorously,
earn a regular living, disguise instead of flaunt whatever may be
their private digressions from the conduct society considers desirable;
when they seek support for the poetical impulse or ask for light on
their self-doubt and fears, they don't make the naked boast that they
are crazy like daisies but they elaborate a new belief in the indispens–
ability of neurosis to art, or beat the bushes for some new deviant
psychoanalysis which will generalize their despair without curing it.
And these differences of style are of course important, at least for
the moment. It is from _the long-range, and no doubt absolute, view
of our immediate cultural situation, which bears so closely upon our
continuing national crisis, that the moral difference between a respect–
able and a disreputable acceptance of defeat seems to me to con–
stitute little more than a cultural footnote to history.
But perhaps I wander too far from the other night at Columbia.
There was enough in the evening that was humanly immediate to
divert one from this kind of ultimate concern....
It
was not an official university occasion. The "beats" appeared
at Columbia on the invitation of a student club - interestingly
enough, the John Dewey Society. Whether the club first approached
Ginsberg or Ginsberg initiated the proceedings, I don't know, but
what had happened was that Ginsberg in his undergraduate days
had taken a loan from the university - $200? $250? - and recently
the Bursar's office had caught up with him in his new incarnation of
successful literary itinerant, to demand repayment. Nothing if not
ingenious, Ginsberg now proposed to payoff his debt by reading his
poetry at Columbia without fee. It was at this point that various
members of the English department, solicited as sponsors for the
operation, had announced their rejection of the whole deal, literary
as well as financial, and the performance was arranged without fi–
nancial benefit to Ginsberg and without official cover; we three
wives, however, decided to attend on our own. We would meet at
7: 45 at the door of the theater; no, we would meet at 7: 40 at
the door of the theater; no, we would meet no later than 7: 30
across the street from the theater: the telephoning back and forth
among the three women was stupendous as word spread of vast
barbarian hordes converging on poor dull McMillin Theater from
all
