Lionel Trilling and Allen Ginsberg: Liberal Father, Radical Son
Adam Kirsch
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In the spring of 1944, as the Second World War neared its turning point, the first skirmishes of the generational battle that would define postwar America were taking place in a lecture hall at Columbia University. When Allen Ginsberg, then a seventeen-year-old freshman, signed up to study the Great Books with Lionel Trilling, neither one of them could have suspected that they were about to begin a lifelong friendship that was also a mortal combat—over literature and politics, morality and maturity, liberalism and radicalism. The Sixties, historians have variously said, started with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or Elvis Presley’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. But a good case can be made that the Sixties really began when Ginsberg walked into Trilling’s classroom.
Years later, Ginsberg recalled that Trilling took a special interest in him from the start. During the war years, Columbia, like all American universities, was overloaded with officer training candidates; most of these had no real interest in Trilling’s thoughts on the Great Books, but in Ginsberg, the eminent critic and intellectual found a student who was already an aspiring writer. Ginsberg also later suggested that “I was probably closest to Trilling because we were both Jewish and he sort of empathized with me.” It was just over a decade since Trilling had overcome the WASP legacy of Columbia’s English Department to become its first tenured Jewish professor, and while he always maintained a certain distance from his own Jewishness, it is certainly plausible that Trilling might have taken a special interest in this precocious Jewish student from provincial Newark, New Jersey.
Ginsberg’s time at Columbia would turn out to be largely unhappy. Looking back, he complained to the poet and fellow alumnus John Hollander about
the whole horror of Columbia, there just was nobody there . . . who had a serious involvement with advanced work in poetry. Just a bunch of dilettantes. And THEY have the nerve to set themselves up as guardians of culture? Why it’s such a piece of effrontery—enough to make anyone paranoiac, it’s a miracle Jack [Kerouac] or myself or anybody independent survived—tho god knows the toll in paranoia been high enough.
But it was not just disagreements about poetry that made Ginsberg feel out of place at the college. As an undergraduate, he found himself involved in two notorious campus scandals, which ended in his being forced to withdraw from Columbia for a year. The first, and by far the more serious one, came in 1944, when one of Ginsberg’s best friends, a student named Lucien Carr, murdered a man named David Kammerer, who was pursuing him in a way that we would now refer to as stalking. After the murder, Carr immediately confided in another of Ginsberg’s closest friends, Jack Kerouac, who helped him get rid of the murder weapon and the victim’s eyeglasses. The next day, Carr confessed to the crime, and because of the circumstances—because his attack on Kammerer could be portrayed as a young man defending himself against a homosexual predator, though in fact their relationship was much more intimate and complex than that—Carr ended up serving only two years in a reformatory.
Ginsberg was not as directly implicated in the scandal as Kerouac, who was a Columbia dropout. But he was very close to both Carr and Kerouac—he visited Carr in jail, bringing him a copy of “Dead Souls” to read—and campus gossip connected him to the whole affair. It was especially devastating to Ginsberg because of the role of homosexuality in the scandal, just as he was trying to come to terms with being gay. (Ginsberg admitted his homosexuality to his draft board, a rare thing to do in the 1940s, and was graded 4-F as a result.)
The second scandal, the one that got Ginsberg suspended from Columbia, was indirectly related to the first one, but much more trivial. Here is how he described it in a letter he wrote in 1979, thirty-four years after the events in question:
What I finger-traced in dust on Livingston Hall dorm window to attract attention and cause window-cleaning by Irish lady whom I sophomorically contemned as inattentive to her duty to a window thick enough with dust to write on was as follows:
BUTLER HAS NO BALLS[2 drawings]
FUCK THE JEWS
The first slogan was paraphrased from a local “Barnard” song “No balls at all/No balls at all/She married a man who had no balls at all.” The second slogan, jejune as it was, was also in the mode of college humor aimed at the cleaning lady who I thought was, being Irish, anti-Semitic, and therefore maybe not cleaning up my room. The drawing was a cock and balls and also (unless my memory’s mistaken on this final detail only) a death’s head.
I wouldn’t have thought the matter of serious importance but the cleaning lady, who did apparently have some edge of querulousness, reported these dusty terrors to the authorities instead of cleaning the window and obliterating any evidence of my evident depravity.
As it happened that very weekend Jack Kerouac who’s been banned from setting foot on the campus as an “unwholesome influence” on his friends . . . came to see me. . . . We talked of life and art long into the night, and as it was too late for him to return to Ozone Park he bedded down with me, chastely as it happens, since I was a complete virgin, much too shy to acknowledge loves that dare not speak names, as far as I understood, on that campus, in that time and of that place.
Morning came and with it a Dean of Student–Faculty Relations coach to athletic department and football team that Kerouac had quit to study poesy . . . who rapped loudly on the suite entrance, then burst in the unlocked door, we were still snoozing innocent in bed. Kerouac opened an eye, saw the enemy coach loose in the dorm-suite jumped out of bed in his skivvies, rushed into the entrance room and jumped into the bed there . . . leaving me alone trembling bare legged in my underwear to face the fury of the assistant dean who pointed angrily at the window and demanded: “Who is responsible, who did this?” “Me,” I admitted my guilt and he insisted, “Wipe that off immediately.” . . . I was wanted in the Dean’s office in an hour. Entering Dean McKnight’s office he greeted me, “Mr. Ginsberg, I hope you realize the enormity of what you’ve done.”
The result of this farcical episode was that Ginsberg was made to withdraw from school for a year.
Ginsberg could be sure that the reader of this letter would notice his allusion to the title of Lionel Trilling’s best-known short story, “Of This Time, Of That Place,” because he was writing to his teacher’s widow, Diana Trilling. Diana Trilling had been a close and hostile observer of Ginsberg’s career ever since he was her husband’s student. For at the same time that Ginsberg was making friends with Beats-in-training like Kerouac and William Burroughs, experimenting with sex and drugs, and making enemies of the Columbia administration, he was also forming a strong and perplexing relationship with Lionel Trilling.
Almost immediately, Ginsberg cast Trilling in the role that he was to play in his mental and emotional life for decades to come: as the father figure, the superego, the embodiment of literature itself. Ginsberg visited Trilling at home and sent him long letters. He even showed him the poems he was writing, which he was afraid to do with his father, Louis Ginsberg, who wrote conventional magazine-style poetry. Ginsberg told Trilling that “my father and I differ so violently on poetic method that I hesitate to ask him for advice and criticism”: in other words, he was asking Trilling to serve in his father’s place. But this wasn’t enough; in 1947, he sent Trilling a letter saying that he was trying to write “fully and directly enough to break down—what is it? Our mutual distrust.”
Trilling, as might be expected, tried to hold this eccentric, passionate student at arm’s length, to preserve some of the teacher-student hierarchy. He replied to Ginsberg’s letter this way: “In itself it is really quite simple: it is that I think our relationship is not intended to be the kind you assume in your letter. Its right condition is set by the original connection between us, that of student and teacher, and by the difference in our ages. . . . If you present your life to me in the manner that you have done, I am willing to receive seriously and affectionately what you tell me, but I can do that only as your teacher and older friend; it would be impossible and pointless for me to reciprocate in anything approaching kind.”
But Trilling could not keep Ginsberg at a comfortable distance, because every time the student got into trouble, he called on his teacher for help. When the Kammerer murder took place, Ginsberg went to Trilling for advice—and also to Mark Van Doren, another favorite professor. More important, when his graffiti got him in trouble, he turned to Trilling to intervene with the Dean. Diana Trilling recalled the episode in her essay “The Other Night at Columbia,” her mordant account of Ginsberg’s poetry reading at Columbia in 1959:
It seems that Ginsberg had traced an obscenity in the dust of a dormitory window; the words were too shocking for the Dean of students to speak, so he had written them on a piece of paper which he pushed across the desk to my husband: “Fuck the Jews.” Even the part of Lionel that wanted to laugh couldn’t; it was too hard for the Dean to have to transmit this message to a Jewish professor—this was still in the forties when being a Jew in the university was not yet what it is today. “But he’s a Jew himself,” said the Dean. “Can you understand his writing a thing like that?” Yes, Lionel could understand; but he couldn’t explain it to the Dean. And anyway, he knew that to appreciate why Ginsberg had traced this particular legend on the window required more than an understanding of Jewish self-hatred . . .”
To Diana Trilling, Ginsberg’s graffiti was self-evidently the product of Jewish self-hatred, though Ginsberg himself insisted that by writing “Fuck the Jews” he was merely trying to bait an anti-Semitic chambermaid. What bothered Diana Trilling most about Ginsberg, however, was not his alleged “Jewish self-hatred.” It was the way he seemed to believe that being a poet gave him special privileges. If it was up to her, the essay makes clear, her husband would not have lifted a finger to protect Ginsberg from the consequences of his actions and his relationships:
Allen Ginsberg had been a student of my husband’s and I had heard about him much more than I usually hear of students for the simple reason that he got into a great deal of trouble which involved his instructors, and had to be rescued and revived and restored; eventually he even had to be kept out of jail. Of course there was always the question, should this young man be rescued, should he be restored? There was even the question, shouldn’t he go to jail? We argued about it some at home but the discussion, I’m afraid, was academic, despite my old resistance to the idea that people like Ginsberg had the right to ask and receive preferential treatment just because they read Rimbaud and Gide and undertook to be writers themselves. . . . Why should I not also defend the expectation that a student at Columbia, even a poet, would 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 failure?
But Lionel Trilling, as his actions proved, did not share this uncomplicated view of literature as a career in which you progressed by regular steps, like a junior executive racking up promotions. Not only did Trilling help Ginsberg in his difficulties as a student, he even rode to his rescue a third time, in 1949, when Ginsberg had already left Columbia. This was when Ginsberg got arrested for being the accomplice to a thief named Herbert Huncke, one of the lowlifes Ginsberg glamorized as an example of Beat alienation; Ginsberg had allowed Huncke to use his apartment to store stolen goods. Once more Ginsberg’s father turned to Lionel Trilling for help, writing to him: “ever since Allen entered college, your name has been a household word with us. He has read, and we have discussed, your articles (in The Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, etc.) Allen looks up to you with something of veneration.” Trilling helped convince the police to send Ginsberg to a mental hospital rather than to jail. It was during his year at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, on West 168th Street, that Ginsberg met Carl Solomon, the saintly psychotic who was the addressee of “Howl.” In this strange, roundabout way, Trilling made “Howl” possible.
The great irony is that while “Howl” was Ginsberg’s masterpiece, the poem that made him famous and guarantees his place in American literature, Trilling couldn’t stand it. In 1956, Ginsberg sent Trilling a copy of the book of “Howl” that had just been published by City Lights in San Francisco. Trilling wrote back saying, surprisingly enough, that he found the explosive poem “dull.” “As to the doctrinal element of the poems,” he explained, “apart from the fact that I of course reject it, it seems to me that I heard it very long ago and that you give it to me in all its orthodoxy, with nothing new added.”
This was surely the reaction Ginsberg least hoped or wanted to hear. For at many points, “Howl” reads like an explicit attack on Columbia and its intellectual culture, of which Trilling himself was a living symbol. The first strophes of the poem mention “negro streets,” invoking the Harlem neighborhood next to Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. The poem’s “angelheaded hipsters” are specifically cast as students who rebel against “universities” and “academies.” The faculty, on the other hand, are “scholars of war”—a shorthand attack on the Cold War alliance of anti-Communists in government and academia, of which Trilling was again a prominent example. There is even, perhaps, an allusion to Ginsberg’s notorious dorm-room graffiti when he writes about “obscene odes on the window of the skull”—after all, his obscene writing on the dust of his window was accompanied by a death’s-head.
In place of Columbia’s liberal civilization, Ginsberg hopes to substitute a radically hedonistic culture of youth, music, drugs, and above all, sex: “Howl” famously extols “a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness.” It’s not hard to see why such a poem became tremendously popular at just the time when the youth culture was forming and sexual liberation was on the way. “Howl” can be read simply as an advertisement for fun, for sex, drugs, and rock and roll—that is one reason why young readers liked it, and why older readers like Diana Trilling scorned it. In “The Other Night at Columbia,” she contrasts the earnestly political radicalism of her generation, in the 1930s, with the hedonism of the Beats:
Everyone judged everyone else; it was a time of incessant cruel moral judgment; today’s friend was tomorrow’s enemy; whoever disagreed with oneself had sold out, God knows to or for what. . . . But it was surely a time of quicker, truer feeling than is now conjured up with marijuana or the infantile camaraderie of Kerouac’s On the Road. . . . Ginsberg says he lives in Harlem, but it’s not the Harlem of the Scottsboro Boys and W. C. Handy and the benign insanity of trying to proletarianize Striver’s Row; their comrades are not the comrades of the Stewart Cafeteria [where the radicals gathered to talk in the 1930s] nor yet of the road, as Kerouac would disingenuously have it, but pick-ups on dark morning streets. . . . It is no accident that today in the fifties our single overt manifestation of protest takes the wholly nonpolitical form of a group of panic-stricken kids in blue jeans, many of them publicly homosexual, talking about or taking drugs, assuring us that they are out of their minds, not responsible. . . . Is it any wonder, then, that Time and Life write as they do about the “beats”—with such a conspicuous show of superiority, and no hint of fear? These periodicals know what genuine, dangerous protest looks like, and it doesn’t look like Ginsberg and Kerouac. Clearly, there is no more menace in “Howl” or On the Road than there is in the Scarsdale PTA.
This is rather exaggerated, but it points to an important truth about Ginsberg and the Beat phenomenon. It was perhaps the first example of the commodification of dissent, of turning radicalism into a mere lifestyle choice that posed no real threat to the established order. What Diana Trilling notes here, in 1959, would play out on a much larger scale in the disappointments of the New Left and the hippie movement in the 1960s.
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