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one of the great contemporary American short stories. Since it was a
document, likely to be read, for instance, by Ginsberg and his father and
by Columbia undergraduates, I found myself while admiring its wonder–
ful honesty deploring what I can call only its pride, its uncharity, its
ruthlessness. There are many faculty wives, probably, who feel as Mrs.
Trilling feels about students' (like religion for Lord Melbourne) being
an excellent thing if they do not intrude into private life, but one is
grateful, for the sake of one's happiness as a teacher, that so few express
their feelings, in print, so brutally:
If
I'd been asked to explain, then, my wish not to meet and
talk with this disturbing young man who had managed to break
through the barrier of student anonymity, I suppose I'd have
rested with the proposition that he made life too messy....
Of course, once upon a time-that was in the thirties--one had
to defend even having a comfortable chair
to
sit in, or a rug
on the floor. But by the forties things had changed; one's most
intransigent literary friends had capitulated by then, everybody
had a well-upholstered sofa, and I was reduced to such mar–
ginal causes as the Metropolitan Museum and the expectation
that visitors would put their ashes in the ash-tray and go home
by 2: 00
A.M.
Then why should I not also defend the expecta–
tion that a student at Columbia, even a poet, should do his
work, submit it to his teachers through the normal channels of
classroom communication, stay out of jail, and, if things went
right, graduate, start publishing, be reviewed, and see what
developed, whether he was a success or a failure.
There is a sort of reasoned case there, however harshly put, against
the idea of the teacher, and even more the teacher's wife, as having a
sort of absolute personal commitment to the student (he only occurs
occasionally ) who combines an ambivalent emotional dependence on
the teacher with streaks of brilliance and a distinctly exhibitionistic un–
balance. Such boys often seem half-idiotic and unwholesome. Yet they
are a teacher's privilege as well as his burden. But reading on, I was
shocked (however much Mr. Ginsberg is a self-exposer) that Mrs.
Trilling should expose the reason why he was expelled from Columbia:
scribbling on the window-dust of a dormitory, "Fuck the Jews." I was
shocked by her smugness about the ungenerosity with which Columbia
seems to have treated Ginsberg financially. He had left owing the uni–
versity about $200, and wanted to pay it off by having a poetry
reading. He was allowed his poetry reading, but no cash. One teacher,
Mr. Dupee, took the chair and Mrs. Trilling is very lyrical about his
tactful but reasonably commonplace, I would have thought, introduc-
