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PARTISAN REVIEW
it was to him that one gave one's pity and for him one felt one's own
fullest terror. Clearly, I am no judge of his poem, "Lion in the
Room," which he announced was dedicated to Lionel Trilling; I
heard it through too much sympathy, and also self-consciousness.
The poem was addressed as well as dedicated to Lionel; it was about
a lion in the room with the poet, a lion who was hungry but refused
to eat
him;
I heard it as a passionate love-poem, I really can't say
whether it was a good or bad poem, but I was much moved by it, in
some part unaccountably.
It
was also a decent poem, it now strikes
me; I mean, there were no obscenities in it as there had been in much
of the poetry the "beats" read. Here was something else that was
remarkable about the other evening: most of the audience was very
young, and Ginsberg must have realized this because when he read
the poem about
his
mother and came to the place where he referred
to the YPSLs of her girlhood, he interposed
his
only textual exegesis
of the evening: in an aside he explained, "Young People's Socialist
League" - he was very earnest about wanting his poetry to be un–
derstood. And it wasn't only his gentility that distinguished Ginsberg'S
father from the rest of the audience; as far as I could see, he was the
only man in the hall who looked old enough to be the father of a
grown son; the audience was crazily young, there were virtually no
faculty present, I suppose they didn't want to give this much sanction
to the "beats." For this young audience the obscenities read from the
stage seemed to have no force whatsoever; there was not even the
shock of silence, and when Ginsberg forgot himself in the question
period and said that something or other was bull-shit, I think he was
more upset than his listeners; I can't imagine anything more de–
tached and scientific outside a psychoanalyst's office, or perhaps a
nursery school, than this young audience at Columbia. Of Corso, in
particular, one had the sense that he mouthed the bad word only with
considerable personal difficulty: this hurts me more than it hurts
you.
Obviously, the whole performance had been carefully devised
as to who would read first and what, then who next, and just how
much an audience could take without becoming bored and over–
critical: it would be my opinion we could have taken a bit more be–
fore the question period which must have been an anti-climax for
anyone who had come, not as a tourist, but as a fellow-traveller. I've
