April 29, 2006--Saturday Story Concluded: "The West End"
The West End
When I arrived at Columbia College as a wretchedly skinny, overgrown, stopped-over freshman, decades ago but just a few years after Jack went on the Road and Allen started to Howl, I skipped orientation and the chance to learn the words to the school anthem, Roar Lion, Roar, and raced right over to Broadway where at a shop that specialized in “collegiate wear” I bought a tweed jacket with leather patches already installed on the sleeves, a pipe, and a beret.
I was all set to join the Beats and knew that, newly outfitted, I would need to find a regular place for myself at the West End Bar, which was just down the street from the Stag Shop. This seemed appropriate to me since I saw the gathering of these cultural accouterments to be essential to the life of the poet. I had hopes that the bartender there might tell me where Allen and Jack had perched; and while puffing on my pipe (you could still smoke in bars) and pitching my beret to just the right angle and blowing the foam off my pint (you could drink at 18), I would be inspired.
I did settle in there, becoming a version of a “regular,” often cutting Comparative Anatomy lab and my Dogfish dissection (as a backup plan to having my poems published by City Lights in San Francisco, I was a pre-med), drank my beers, sometimes seasoned with tears, and waited in vain for words to come to me.
Though I felt sufficiently hysterical and naked, few did.
* * *
So in pursuit of my alternate plan I devoted myself just enough to my Dogfish’s cranial nerves in an attempt to earn at least what at the time was called “a gentleman’s C.” In fact, I was good enough at dissection that my fish was stolen from the tank in which it was stored between lab sessions. Pre-meds were a competitive lot, seeing themselves in competition with each other for coveted spots in top-ten medical schools; and anything they could do to elevate themselves on the grading curve, particularly by lowering yours, was something to which they devoted themselves.
It was a good thing, therefore, that I discovered that the lab’s side door led to the amphitheater classroom where the great Lionel Trilling held forth on the immortals of Modern Literature—Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Kafka, and of course his beloved Freud. If I couldn’t find inspiration at the West End perhaps I could with Trilling.
I would poke away at the dog fish for awhile; and when the lab technician went out for a smoke I would slither through that door and, wrapped in my rubber apron, sit on the steps, taking it all in—less his critical insights than his performance and he strode and gestured in his elegant tweeds (I was clearly right about the clothes), the very embodiment of the Liberal Imagination. If I was not to be Ginsberg, I at least wanted Trilling’s posture.
He was aware of me—not because of anything I might have offered but because of my outfit, hungry look, and the piercing smell of formaldehyde that surrounded me. I noticed him taking note of me, nodding, “It’s OK,” as if he knew what was behind that door and how, if fate had turned out differently for him, this Jewish god of literature might have been found bent over his own Dogfish a few decades earlier, in that very same lab, and someone else would be astride that platform.
Though I found myself drawn more and more toward the study of literature rather than its creation, I did not fail to maintain my status at the West End. Especially since I was at last finding inspiration there—not poetic, alas, but, yes, carnal. For slinking on a stool at the other side of the horseshoe-shaped end of the mahogany bar was a girl all in black—leotard, tights (cut off at the ankle), jewelry, nails, eye shadow, hair, and, most alluringly, beret. All black. If not a muse for poetry for sure one for lust.
She was Lydia Riffelstein from East Paterson, New Jersey and was enrolled at Barnard. She emphasized “enrolled” because she was proud to insist and proclaim that she rarely “attended.” She was training to be a dancer, a modern dancer, and was “taking” (dancer-talk for studying) with Martha Graham. This left her no time for ordinary lectures and recitations. Her life was devoted to learning Graham’s intricate chorography, sequences of movements composed mainly of violent pelvic contractions, which sounded to me, pre-med that I sadly was, very much like endless hours of childbirth. Or perhaps something else, excitingly different, that was still not part of my physical vocabulary.
I managed to summon enough courage to engage this vision in shadows, in my still clumsy way, when I learned who she was taking with. In my feeble attempt to be witty (a highly valued trait of Mr. Trilling’s that I was desperate to acquire), I said, “I thought she was dead.”
“You should be so dead,” Lydia snorted and turned back to her Dance Magazine and Campari and Soda.
From some inner source of resolve, of which I had hitherto been unaware, I pressed on, yet with a stammer, “I know that was stupid. I’ve never known a modern dancer before and couldn’t think of anything witty to say.”
“You have a lot to learn. About both dance and wit. That I can see.”
“I would like to know more about dance. Are you performing as well as taking classes?”
“I take ten classes a week, all either intermediate or advanced. Martha even has me demonstrate and so I’m hoping that she might let me join one of her companies. Not the one that performs in New York. I’m far from that. But I’m good.” She leaned toward me provacatively, “Very good.”
I had never known anyone who so unabashedly would claim to be good, much less very good. And who would call someone like Martha Graham Martha. I came from a world of doubt and equivocation, and so I was transfixed.
“Do you think, maybe . . . . “
“Yes, I would like that. In fact, this Saturday night there is a Merce Cunningham concert. I love Merce and for you it would be a good beginning.” And with that she ran off. Actually, danced off. Though with no contractions visible.
Martha and Merce and beginnings. I drew hard on my pipe and adjusted my beret. Allen and Jack and even Lionel could wait!
Of course it came to nothing. Actually, it turned out to be a disaster.
* * *
We had agreed to meet in front of the City Center at 7:00, buy tickets, see the concert, and then have dinner. She had been quite precise about the plans, including that she would pay for the tickets and I would pick a place to eat and pay for that.
I arrived ten minutes early and had time to gape at the gathering crowd. All dancers who seemed to know each other, with everyone sheathed in the required black. Then in a swirl, Lydia arrived, kissing her way toward me. She was wrapped in layers of coats and scarves and fur tails, and as she moved toward me I felt that nothing I was about to see inside would equal this performance—it was as if she had choreographed and costumed her entrance so that she and her layers became a single organism. But no one but me seemed to notice.
We sat in the third balcony but even from that great height it was evident that Merce was majestic. I was thrilled to be there, especially at Lydia’s side and as a part of her world, but I did not understand anything that he did on stage. Lydia had told me that he believed in chance, to be more precise in “uncertainty.” That his work was influenced by that of Werner Heisenberg, the physicist who had discovered the Uncertainty Principle. Merce incorporated those ideas in his choreography, which meant that he provided what she called frameworks within which his dancers were to move but, following chance, they were expected to improvise, allowing uncertainty to inspire and guide them.
To help chance along, Merce worked with the artist Robert Rauschenberg who designed the scenery, which pretty much consisted of a battered bicycle suspended from a rope above the stage (Lydia told me how much she loved Bob’s work) and with composer John Cage, who, at this performance provided “music” (Lydia called him “Cage” and it “sound”) from a series of radios and tape recorders from which, by turning their dials randomly, he produced the cacophonous sound of uncertainty itself.
Merce and his dancers under the spell of the swinging bicycle and, to me, this noise lurched into a series of movements that looked more like twitches than the seamless grace of the ballet dancers I had seen on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was so discordant, so shrill, so disjointed, and painful, even to the point of boredom (it went on uninterrupted for ninety minutes), that I was certain that I was in the presence of genius.
Above the sounds that boomed from the amplification system and ricocheted off the fretted arches that supported that doom of a room, I could hear Lydia moaning. I was convinced then, by that, that I was privileged to be witnessing Great Art.
She hung on my arm as we departed, heading for a place a worldly roommate of mine had recommended, La Cave Henri IV, just around the corner. “Very French,” he promised, adding with a wink and elbow dig, “And tres romantique.” I was taking Intermediate French for the second time and thought, as Lydia had been my guide to modern dance I could be hers in gastronomie.
Lydia leaned into me as we fought the wind, her fur tails whipping my face. It was cold and we were pleased to find, I should not have been surprised--it was a cave--that the restaurant was snuggly below street level. We descended the steps and entered the dim room. So darkly romantique that it took a moment for our eyes to adjust and for us to find our way to the table that had been reserved for us. It was perfect, under a barrel-shaped brick arch that supported the sidewalk above. We squeezed into the banquette, nestling side-by-side. I could feel Lydia shivering against me while the voice of Edith Piaf filled the room. We were no longer in the world of uncertainty. I was back on the more familiar ground of cause and effect.
The table was lit by a candle that was stuffed into the neck of a wine bottle, so encrusted with dripped wax that I was certain it had held candles since the time of Henri IV.
The waiter, le garcon, glided over toward us, sheathed in a floor-length white butcher’s apron, sleeves held in place by what looked to me like small garters, a folded towel over one crooked arm, and two menus and a wine list in the other, “Monsieur. Mademoiselle,” he said with a slight bow as he handed them to us. “Would you like a drink, an aperitif before ordering?”
I answered for both of us, “No thank you.” Rolling my r’s as best I could, “Merci, we’ll be having wine with dinner.” I had brought enough money with me for food and wine but not for anything else.
“Let me tell you that to begin we have fresh escargots this evening. The chef recommends them. This is very unusual for this time of year. Le hiver.” With that, like an Apache dancer, snapping his starched apron, he spun on his heel and departed, leaving us to peruse the menus. Piaf wafted over me. This was a taste of life as I had only imagined it.
Lydia roused me from my revere, suggesting, “Why don’t you order for the both of us, though I love escargots and prefer red wine.”
“I do as well,” I lied, I wasn’t in truth sure just what escargots were, “How about two of them and maybe some trout?” Truite I knew.
“But I really prefer red wine,” I wasn’t sure what she was signaling, “Maybe some chicken or veal? That would work.”
I was squinting at the menu. It was so dark in spite of the sputtering candle but I needed to see if they had any chicken and how much it cost. Thankfully they did and it was affordable. “Sure—two escargots and two cog au vins.”
Before I could call for him our garcon was back at the table, “We’ll have two of the cogs and two of the specials. Deux.”
“You mean, bien sur, les cogs au vins as entres, non?”
“Of course.”
“And pour boire?”
“Do you have red wine?”
I sensed the beginning of exasperation; and with a nod and perhaps a wink toward Lydia, he said, “Sans doute. Beaucoup. Many.” And with that he unceremoniously reached across the table and me, picking up the Carte du Vins and plopped it open to the Vin Rouge plastic covered page. As he was doing that, Lydia asked if I would get up so she could slide out of the booth. She wanted to “freshen up.”
The waiter hovered over me impatiently, tapping his fingers on the menus he clutched against his chest as I scanned down the list, looking for something that sounded sophisticated yet wasn’t too expensive. “How is the Beaujoulet Village?” I asked in a half voice, not looking up, to avoid eye contact and any hint of chastisement since I wasn’t at all sure of my “j” pronunciation.
Without responding, he turned on his heel and disappeared into the shadows.
Lydia returned, looking even more radiant. Whatever she had done to freshen up had worked. “Did you order the wine? On a night like this I could surely use some.” And as if on cue our waiter was back and in an intricate twisting of hands and wrists popped the cork which he passed along to me. Nervously I began to roll it back and forth on the table cloth. He stood there immobile and waited, looking from me to Lydia and then back to me. Now clearly exasperated, he wrapped the bottle in a napkin and poured about a half inch in my glass, cradling the bottle in his arm as if wanting me to see and read the label. It was too dark for that.
I was also beginning to feel exasperated myself, thinking how improper of him to serve me first and then to pour so little and to stand there all puffed up in Gallic pride as if he was a potentate. . . . I was getting ready to say something, but thought I would begin by just glaring at him. Which I did. We locked eyes. It was a test of good manners and male egos.
He took a step back and I began to again feel in command of the situation. After all we had just been with Merce and Bob and Cage while he had been prancing around in his apron in a basement of a French restaurant.
I turned toward Lydia, who I assumed would be feeling almost as much pride as I. She leaned toward me, under lit by the light of the throbbing candle and thus made more alluring, she whispered, “He’s waiting for you to taste it.”
I was confused, “To what?”
“You know, to taste it to see if it’s turned.”
“Turned into what?” I sensed doom lurking.
“To see if it tastes all right.” Was I sensing even more exasperation? “If you want to send it back.”
As I was about to say, “But I would never do that,” the garcon poured a splash into Lydia’s glass, sneering in my direction, “Peut-etre, voulez-vous, Madmoiselle le saveur?”
And in perfect French, with all “r’s” rolling and every “j” aspirating, Lydia raised the wine toward her blackened lips and said, “Avec plaisier.” She seemed at first to inhale it, dipping her nose well into the bulging goblet, and then, after swishing the wine from cheek to cheek, she said, “C’est bien. Merci. A bit innocent but still fine.” She nodded to him and he filled her glass and, with a further look of rebuke, mine.
Silence descended between us and I barely noticed when the escargots arrived, set in their specially indented dishes with what seemed like surgical instruments on the side. Needless to say I had no idea what to do with either the creatures in the shells or the tools of their extraction. Without a word, Lydia simply reached across and showed me what to do.
It would take much more than that to show me what to do. I clearly did not know what to do about many things. Though I vowed that come Monday, if I lived through the rest of dinner and the subway back to Columbia, I would stop being a Chemistry major and would switch to English. I could still be a pre-med, but I needed to learn many, many things from Lionel Trilling. That much I knew.
* * *
I was formally and officially enrolled next semester in Trilling’s course in Modern Lit, along with 150 other Jews and occasional Gentiles, the Jews seeking to rise from the cultural shtetls in which they were hatched. None more eager than I, still raw from the humiliations in Le Cave.
I sat now in an actual chair, no longer huddling on the lab steps. And in place of that rubber apron I broke out my Stag Shop tweeds, leaving the beret and pipe behind in the dorm, thinking they would draw too much attention to me—I needed to be inconspicuous as I made my way by stealth into this new and hermetic world.
I knew immediately that I was where I needed to be because during the very first class, Trilling prowled the lecture platform, tossing his leonine head, stopping by the window with his great brow aslant so as to catch the flat rays of late afternoon light that illuminated him like an icon, his very first words were something like—
“A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.”
Do you see what I mean? The “tyranny of my culture”! Whatever my parents were paying in tuition, I was at last getting their money’s worth.
Further, now on the other side of the room, my side, turning to us, to me, lowering his head and white mane—
“All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is self.”
Do you hear that Lydia? Merce? Cage? All of us anguished souls--Vin rouge for everyone. My treat!
Through that enchanted semester, paying close attention to the texts, Trilling raised questions about how we live our lives (thank you D.H.), about the character of good and evil (much appreciated, Friedrich), about the roles played by culture and biology (Sigmund, thank you), and the ambivalences when making moral choices (T.S. my new best friend). We came to look for something in Trilling that went beyond the insights of ordinary literary criticism. We expected something closer to wisdom.
He was so exalted, so radiant, existing so much in his own world of thought that as mere mortal undergraduates we took that wisdom scrap by scrap. Never was any of it directed toward any one of us or the result of anything we might have croaked back to him when he posed a question to the room. That wisdom was palpably present in the room, like the air itself, a rich oxygen of thought.
But there was at least the opportunity to write something for him, actually to him—the term paper about which he gave no guidance whatsoever, particularly how many pages it needed to be. Just, write a paper about any of the authors we have been reading. We knew by this that he was taking us seriously.
I decided to take a chance—to write about Kafka, about whom he confessed, after reading The Trial again (he actually reread the texts under consideration??), when he confessed that he did not have anything fresh to say about it, though his lectures certainly sounded fresh and imaginative to his disciples.
My paper was on “Farcical Elements in The Trial.” Whatever was possessing me? I dropped all other reading, attending all my other classes, and my favorite pastime, sleep, so I could hone and rehone the paper. After a week of frantic effort, I stumbled to his office, having redrafted and retyped it for the fourth time. Only his deadline stopped me from working on it until I reached middle age.
I dropped it secure in its plastic binder into a cardboard carton on a chair outside his office door. And waited. It was my first fully fleshed out paper as a pre-med-English-major, and I knew that what he might have to say about it would affect the course of the rest of my life. He had told us that they would be read by the end of the week and we could come by at that time to pick them up from that same carton. Rumor had it that he would not actually read them, that they would be read by one of his graduate assistants. But even what they had to say about them would be life-altering—they were his GAs, weren’t they?
With my classmates I lined for hours waiting in the corridor of Hamilton Hall for the papers to be dumped in the box. It was obvious that very little showering had occurred among us that week—it was a hot day and things were feeling very ripe so it was with various forms of relief that word spread down the hall that they were there and we could rummage through the pile to retrieve our offerings.
Though I had been among the first to line up, I allowed everyone to pass me and was thus the last to look for in my paper. There it was, seemingly untouched and unread alone in the bottom of the box. I gathered it to me, and as I walked back toward my dorm, barely breathing, I thumbed through it. I was distraught to notice that the twenty-seven pages were seemingly untouched—there was not one correction or anything underlined in red, much less any comment, however brief, scrawled in any of the margins. My first thought was that it was such a pathetic effort that the grad assistant hadn’t even read all the way through.
I was devastated. All I could think about was how I would need to get back into my Organic chemistry studies so I could rescue at least a C grade or there would also be no medical school for me. I saw my future looming with me in a windowless cubicle at a desk in an insurance company.
I slinked back to my room and collapsed on my bed, wondering if it was too late to get to the lab and work on my titrations.
As I lay there staring at the ceiling, maybe even contemplating if the light fixture would support my weight on a rope, one of my floor mates, Gene Adam pounded on the door. He was a real English major, on a fast track to graduate school, who had taken three courses with Trilling, and was eager to find out how I had done. The answer was immediately apparent when he found me sprawled out in despair on my cot.
“What happened? Did you flunk?”
“No,” I mumbled, “Worse than that. He didn’t even look at it. It came back blank--not a comment, not a grade. He just tossed it back in the box.”
Gene found the paper on my desk and flipped through it. I could see him shrugging his shoulders and muttering in confusion as he turned each of the unmarked pages. But just as he was about to toss it back, he slapped his hand on the desktop and screamed at me, “I can’t believe you. You’re a total moron. Look at this.” He held the paper up to me with the folder open to the blank page at the back that I had inserted to dress up the look of the paper. “Look at what he wrote. I mean Trilling himself. I recognize his handwriting.”
I pulled myself up off the bed and snatched the paper from him. There in Trilling’s own delicate hand, in pencil, faint but still vivid, in truth throbbing, was— “Well written.” And circled, my grade, an A minus.
* * *
And so when two weeks later, there was a flyer tacked to all the bulletin boards on campus, announcing that Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky and, and Allen Ginsberg would be on campus for a reading in McMillin Theater, and that Lionel Trilling would introduce them, I grabbed my blanket, pillow, and two boxes of cereal and raced over--it was scheduled for two days hence and I would need to sleep and eat outside the theater entrance so I could be at the front of the line and thus be able to get a seat in the first row. But since so many others with folding chairs and sleeping bags had the same idea, when I arrived, the line was already around the corner by much better equipped campers. I knew I would have to settle for the balcony again, as at the City Center, which was OK because these were my people and my world.
And so I squatted in line. But before my cereal ran out, and the rains came, the staff at McMillin took pity on those sprawled outside their door and let us buy tickets. Or maybe they were just tired of having to step over our ragtag army of Trilling and Ginsberg acolytes. This, though, took away some of the delicious opportunity to suffer for one’s art. It felt good, however, to have spent at least one night on the pavement in its service, and I needed to shave.
So, trice-armed with my ticket, my A minus, and my “Well written,” I took a break for the rest of the week from my sulfanilamide experiment and renewed my acquaintance with the West End, thinking there was no better place to prepare for what was upcoming.
I had not been there for some time, not wanting to revisit the memories of my time with Lydia; and thankfully did not find her there. Just the welcoming greeting of Johnny the bartender, who without missing a beat, as if I had been there just yesterday, asked, “The usual?” already pulling on the Watney’s Ale siphon--my “usual.”
And on the napkin on which Johnny rested my beer, I found myself beginning to write a poem.
Though I had immersed myself in my literature classes, during the past six months I had suspended all thoughts and even dreams of writing. I not only had made the pre-med-backup-plan compromise, but as I thought about what to do with my literary interests, under the same kind of pressure to be responsible, I had not as yet even begun to shrug off that tyrannical aspect of my culture that kept me tethered to practicalness: I could still hear the echo of my father’s bellowing when I told him about switching majors from Chemistry to English—“For what reason? You tell me you want to be happy. What does happiness have to do with anything?” And since I didn’t have a ready answer for him much less myself, I continued to straddle my many worlds.
So from where was this poem spawning?
these wooden streets
wet nimbused now
like starfish
crushed . . . .
And so on. Just this small napkin’s worth of words.
* * *
For the reading I remembered to bring along my pipe and beret, which I hoped would distinguish me, make me noticeable up in the shadows of the balcony, now that I was wanting to emerge from inconspicuousness.
The house was packed. The entire literature faculty was there, as were the graduate assistants and every English major, graduate and undergraduate, including from Barnard—though I, with relief, again did not see Lydia.
There were four chairs on the stage and a podium. Nothing more. Then suddenly, as if in a vision, they all appeared at once, in a surge—following the ever elegant Trilling from the wings were Corso, in tattered fatigues; Orlovsky, all blonde and tweeds; and Ginsberg, shuffling, slumping, awkward, covered in denim. I remember the clothes better than the poems, taking more note of how to look the part than the part itself—Would I be Trilling? Certainly not Orlovsky, reportedly Ginsberg’s lover. I could be Corso, clearly the minor player, perhaps more suited as a model for my A minus talent. Ginsberg of Howl and Kaddish was beyond imagining, though I already had the denims.
First up was Orlovsky, happily brief because his writing did not compare with the beauty of his lips or face or hair—“My body turned into sugar, poured into tea. I found the meaning.” And then there was Corso, twisted in a corkscrew at the podium, who read in a sputtering staccato more appropriate for Greenwich Village coffee houses than that baroque room—“I stand in the dark light of the dark street. And look up at my window, I was born there.” Beat though he fully was, he did have the courtesy to move along quickly, knowing he was in truth the opening act.
Then it was Ginsberg’s turn. This was his first appearance at the back university which years earlier had expelled him. Trilling rose to introduce him, smoothing his jacket which had remained buttoned while he sat. In his impeccable half-British diction he said something about how after going through Howl twice, “I find I don't know how to respond. The poem does not reach me. Its clue doesn't appear."
At this, Ginsberg, twisting in his seat, tossed one leg up over the left arm so he would be turned aggressively toward his old professor. Peering at him, with a wry smile on his already lined face. When he heard Trilling say his name in public for the first time in literary history, amplified in that great room, Ginsberg uncoiled his serpentine self and moved toward to the podium that had been transformed form the shuffle of his arrival to pure panther. Trilling returned to his seat, sat quickly, crossing his legs with considerable care so as not to disturb the tight crease in his trousers.
Ginsberg began by reading from "The Lion for Real." He told us that he dedicated the poem to his former teacher Lionel Trilling and that it described a series of spiritual visions he had had while at Columbia (now I got the lion reference), visions that had set him upon the mystical quest that had become his preoccupation, and etched those premature lines in his cheeks. The poem, he said, turning pointedly to face Trilling, also recounted the difficulty he had had in translating his visions to his friends, family, and teachers. I think at that reference, he took a half-step in Trilling’s direction, indicating that the poem reflected his own despair and sense of spiritual isolation at Columbia.
I do now remember one or two lines, which he then read, without referring to the tortured pile of his papers on the podium, speaking them in one long breath, off mike, leaning directly toward his adversary. We all needed to lean forward to hear them, knowing the Professor Kandisky of the poem was Professor Trilling!
sat by his side every night averting my eyes from his hungry motheaten face
stopped eating myself he got weaker and roared at night while I had nightmares
Eaten by lion in bookstore on Cosmic Campus, a lion myself starved by
Professor Kandisky, dying in a lion's flophouse circus
Kandisky/Trilling in a flophouse? Though there were 1,400 of us packed into that theater, I sensed that everyone had stopped breathing. Even the great scions of literature gasped, including the ancient Moses Hadas, Columbia’s lion of Greek Tragedy, which for him could have been fatal; and Mark Van Doren, of the Van Doren literary dynasty that included his disgraced quiz-show son Charles.
Ginsberg turned his back to his professor on the stage, and very much into the microphone this time, looking up especially to those of us breathless in the balcony, “Remember,” he said, imitating Trilling’s clipped style, “All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men. It springs from the anguish of great souls.”
And without turning back to him, but still to us, Ginsberg asked, “Isn’t that so Mr. Trilling?” If the Great Hadas had been thinking in a Sophoclean mode, he must have sensed patricide.
* * *
For the first time in my life I needed a drink and there was of course only one place to seek it.
Though it was well past 11:00 p.m., Johnny was still on duty and moved to the Watney’s tap as he saw me at the door. I had raced away from the commotion that ensued at McMillin and when I got to the West End it was empty—every one of the regulars had been at the event.
I was pulsating.
I had had my own vision. Though it would not lead to a lifetime-long spiritual quest or probably even many publishable poems, I at least right then knew I would never again set foot in a chemistry lab and there would be no medical school. I didn’t know where I was headed, but it was surely not there. Even if to oblivion.
I collapsed onto my stool and in one swallow sucked in half the draft. I played and replayed the tape in my head of what had transpired—especially Ginsburg’s call to us in the balcony about the “anguish of souls”—actually quoting back to him and to us Trilling’s own words, but as transmuted up to us, through the medium of Ginsberg, they felt as if they had reshaped the very neurons in my cerebellum.
Thus stimulated, on a second cocktail napkin, in almost automatic writing, as if the words were coming to me from a source outside myself, I wrote, to conclude the poem I had begun a few days ago--
on these I trod
wet now as the wood
after passing the baby clams
but never having asked
if you cried
when your father died
And with that the front door swung open and in a rush of Beats in Army-Navy clothes, at the head of the pack, was Ginsberg, with Orlovsky at his side. “Johnny,” he cried, with arms outstretched as he made his way to the bar.
And Johnny said, “The usual?” reaching for a bottle of Ballantine.
But Ginsberg paused, as if disoriented, at the horseshoe end of the bar near where I was frozen to my stool. Looking around for Johnny who had disappeared below the bar to get Ginsberg’s beer from the cooler down there where he kept the bottles. As Johnny’s head reemerged, while still half bent over, he waved to me with the back of his hand. To get up. To move.
I was on Ginsberg’s stool! Which now felt like a griddle. I leapt off it as if afraid it would roast and flay my body.
“That’s all right,” he said to me, touching my shoulder with the sting of his hand, “Stay where you are. I can sit anywhere. After all that, I need a beer, maybe two, and then we’re off.” With a wink toward Orlovsky, he to me added, “You look as if you belong here.” He nodded to Johnny, indicating everything was fine, but Johnny’s look back to me made it clear that I had still better move, and fast. Not that I needed any reminding.
Seeking inconspicuousness again, I ducked into a dark booth on the other side of the bar, not pausing to take my Watney’s with me. Ginsberg lowered himself onto his stool and was immediately engulfed by the crowd that continued to surge in from McMillin.
Though I was physically present, the surreality of that entire evening, now with Ginsberg unbelievably looming fewer than ten feet away, turned the West End into a mix of dreams and cinematic images, with me more a distant, wishful observer than a physical presence.
Almost immediately, I felt myself slipping out of consciousness. It was more than the Watney’s taking hold of me. And as I was about to literally slide off the leather banquette, just as I was about to collapse under the influence, and the bench, I saw as if he was a hallucination, the hair-haloed head of Ginsberg, towering before me.
“Is this yours?” he asked, holding something out toward me.
“My what?” I somehow managed to mumble, desperately trying to hold on to the table.
“This, this napkin,” his hand was still extended. “I found it where you were sitting. At the bar,” he smiled, “At your seat.”
“Yes, my napkin. Thank you. I left it there. Sorry. I meant to take it with me. And my beer.”
“You should have it because I saw your were writing on it.”
“I was just doodling. I’m not really a writer or anything.” I was by then hoping I would pass out entirely and disappear forever in that booth.
“Actually, I thought it wasn’t bad. I liked the reference to the ‘baby clams.’”
He turned to his coterie who were watching and listening from the bar, and said to them more than to me, “Its clue appeared to me.”
Then he was gone, back out into the blare of Broadway, in pursuit of his vision, he and they rolling and embracing in fits of ribald laughter.
* * *
I did in fact return to the Lab and did in fact managed to eek out a C plus in Organic, enough to guarantee at least a fighting chance of being accepted by a second-tier medical school somewhere in the middle of the country.
I had taken that beer-soaked napkin back to my room and aligned it to the first one, feeling that the two parts formed something resembling an actual poem, the clue of which remaining sufficiently allusive to me to pump me full of enough courage to submit it for publication to a few small presses. And, to my surprise and delight, before even submitting any applications to Med schools, I heard from the mimeographed poetry magazine, Black Sun, that my crushed starfish poem would be published--if they could get enough money together to by ink for the printing machine.
Nothing much came of that. And to this day I wonder what would have happened if Trilling had given me a straight A on my Kafka paper.
Would that have been the difference?
When I arrived at Columbia College as a wretchedly skinny, overgrown, stopped-over freshman, decades ago but just a few years after Jack went on the Road and Allen started to Howl, I skipped orientation and the chance to learn the words to the school anthem, Roar Lion, Roar, and raced right over to Broadway where at a shop that specialized in “collegiate wear” I bought a tweed jacket with leather patches already installed on the sleeves, a pipe, and a beret.
I was all set to join the Beats and knew that, newly outfitted, I would need to find a regular place for myself at the West End Bar, which was just down the street from the Stag Shop. This seemed appropriate to me since I saw the gathering of these cultural accouterments to be essential to the life of the poet. I had hopes that the bartender there might tell me where Allen and Jack had perched; and while puffing on my pipe (you could still smoke in bars) and pitching my beret to just the right angle and blowing the foam off my pint (you could drink at 18), I would be inspired.
I did settle in there, becoming a version of a “regular,” often cutting Comparative Anatomy lab and my Dogfish dissection (as a backup plan to having my poems published by City Lights in San Francisco, I was a pre-med), drank my beers, sometimes seasoned with tears, and waited in vain for words to come to me.
Though I felt sufficiently hysterical and naked, few did.
* * *
So in pursuit of my alternate plan I devoted myself just enough to my Dogfish’s cranial nerves in an attempt to earn at least what at the time was called “a gentleman’s C.” In fact, I was good enough at dissection that my fish was stolen from the tank in which it was stored between lab sessions. Pre-meds were a competitive lot, seeing themselves in competition with each other for coveted spots in top-ten medical schools; and anything they could do to elevate themselves on the grading curve, particularly by lowering yours, was something to which they devoted themselves.
It was a good thing, therefore, that I discovered that the lab’s side door led to the amphitheater classroom where the great Lionel Trilling held forth on the immortals of Modern Literature—Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Kafka, and of course his beloved Freud. If I couldn’t find inspiration at the West End perhaps I could with Trilling.
I would poke away at the dog fish for awhile; and when the lab technician went out for a smoke I would slither through that door and, wrapped in my rubber apron, sit on the steps, taking it all in—less his critical insights than his performance and he strode and gestured in his elegant tweeds (I was clearly right about the clothes), the very embodiment of the Liberal Imagination. If I was not to be Ginsberg, I at least wanted Trilling’s posture.
He was aware of me—not because of anything I might have offered but because of my outfit, hungry look, and the piercing smell of formaldehyde that surrounded me. I noticed him taking note of me, nodding, “It’s OK,” as if he knew what was behind that door and how, if fate had turned out differently for him, this Jewish god of literature might have been found bent over his own Dogfish a few decades earlier, in that very same lab, and someone else would be astride that platform.
Though I found myself drawn more and more toward the study of literature rather than its creation, I did not fail to maintain my status at the West End. Especially since I was at last finding inspiration there—not poetic, alas, but, yes, carnal. For slinking on a stool at the other side of the horseshoe-shaped end of the mahogany bar was a girl all in black—leotard, tights (cut off at the ankle), jewelry, nails, eye shadow, hair, and, most alluringly, beret. All black. If not a muse for poetry for sure one for lust.
She was Lydia Riffelstein from East Paterson, New Jersey and was enrolled at Barnard. She emphasized “enrolled” because she was proud to insist and proclaim that she rarely “attended.” She was training to be a dancer, a modern dancer, and was “taking” (dancer-talk for studying) with Martha Graham. This left her no time for ordinary lectures and recitations. Her life was devoted to learning Graham’s intricate chorography, sequences of movements composed mainly of violent pelvic contractions, which sounded to me, pre-med that I sadly was, very much like endless hours of childbirth. Or perhaps something else, excitingly different, that was still not part of my physical vocabulary.
I managed to summon enough courage to engage this vision in shadows, in my still clumsy way, when I learned who she was taking with. In my feeble attempt to be witty (a highly valued trait of Mr. Trilling’s that I was desperate to acquire), I said, “I thought she was dead.”
“You should be so dead,” Lydia snorted and turned back to her Dance Magazine and Campari and Soda.
From some inner source of resolve, of which I had hitherto been unaware, I pressed on, yet with a stammer, “I know that was stupid. I’ve never known a modern dancer before and couldn’t think of anything witty to say.”
“You have a lot to learn. About both dance and wit. That I can see.”
“I would like to know more about dance. Are you performing as well as taking classes?”
“I take ten classes a week, all either intermediate or advanced. Martha even has me demonstrate and so I’m hoping that she might let me join one of her companies. Not the one that performs in New York. I’m far from that. But I’m good.” She leaned toward me provacatively, “Very good.”
I had never known anyone who so unabashedly would claim to be good, much less very good. And who would call someone like Martha Graham Martha. I came from a world of doubt and equivocation, and so I was transfixed.
“Do you think, maybe . . . . “
“Yes, I would like that. In fact, this Saturday night there is a Merce Cunningham concert. I love Merce and for you it would be a good beginning.” And with that she ran off. Actually, danced off. Though with no contractions visible.
Martha and Merce and beginnings. I drew hard on my pipe and adjusted my beret. Allen and Jack and even Lionel could wait!
Of course it came to nothing. Actually, it turned out to be a disaster.
* * *
We had agreed to meet in front of the City Center at 7:00, buy tickets, see the concert, and then have dinner. She had been quite precise about the plans, including that she would pay for the tickets and I would pick a place to eat and pay for that.
I arrived ten minutes early and had time to gape at the gathering crowd. All dancers who seemed to know each other, with everyone sheathed in the required black. Then in a swirl, Lydia arrived, kissing her way toward me. She was wrapped in layers of coats and scarves and fur tails, and as she moved toward me I felt that nothing I was about to see inside would equal this performance—it was as if she had choreographed and costumed her entrance so that she and her layers became a single organism. But no one but me seemed to notice.
We sat in the third balcony but even from that great height it was evident that Merce was majestic. I was thrilled to be there, especially at Lydia’s side and as a part of her world, but I did not understand anything that he did on stage. Lydia had told me that he believed in chance, to be more precise in “uncertainty.” That his work was influenced by that of Werner Heisenberg, the physicist who had discovered the Uncertainty Principle. Merce incorporated those ideas in his choreography, which meant that he provided what she called frameworks within which his dancers were to move but, following chance, they were expected to improvise, allowing uncertainty to inspire and guide them.
To help chance along, Merce worked with the artist Robert Rauschenberg who designed the scenery, which pretty much consisted of a battered bicycle suspended from a rope above the stage (Lydia told me how much she loved Bob’s work) and with composer John Cage, who, at this performance provided “music” (Lydia called him “Cage” and it “sound”) from a series of radios and tape recorders from which, by turning their dials randomly, he produced the cacophonous sound of uncertainty itself.
Merce and his dancers under the spell of the swinging bicycle and, to me, this noise lurched into a series of movements that looked more like twitches than the seamless grace of the ballet dancers I had seen on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was so discordant, so shrill, so disjointed, and painful, even to the point of boredom (it went on uninterrupted for ninety minutes), that I was certain that I was in the presence of genius.
Above the sounds that boomed from the amplification system and ricocheted off the fretted arches that supported that doom of a room, I could hear Lydia moaning. I was convinced then, by that, that I was privileged to be witnessing Great Art.
She hung on my arm as we departed, heading for a place a worldly roommate of mine had recommended, La Cave Henri IV, just around the corner. “Very French,” he promised, adding with a wink and elbow dig, “And tres romantique.” I was taking Intermediate French for the second time and thought, as Lydia had been my guide to modern dance I could be hers in gastronomie.
Lydia leaned into me as we fought the wind, her fur tails whipping my face. It was cold and we were pleased to find, I should not have been surprised--it was a cave--that the restaurant was snuggly below street level. We descended the steps and entered the dim room. So darkly romantique that it took a moment for our eyes to adjust and for us to find our way to the table that had been reserved for us. It was perfect, under a barrel-shaped brick arch that supported the sidewalk above. We squeezed into the banquette, nestling side-by-side. I could feel Lydia shivering against me while the voice of Edith Piaf filled the room. We were no longer in the world of uncertainty. I was back on the more familiar ground of cause and effect.
The table was lit by a candle that was stuffed into the neck of a wine bottle, so encrusted with dripped wax that I was certain it had held candles since the time of Henri IV.
The waiter, le garcon, glided over toward us, sheathed in a floor-length white butcher’s apron, sleeves held in place by what looked to me like small garters, a folded towel over one crooked arm, and two menus and a wine list in the other, “Monsieur. Mademoiselle,” he said with a slight bow as he handed them to us. “Would you like a drink, an aperitif before ordering?”
I answered for both of us, “No thank you.” Rolling my r’s as best I could, “Merci, we’ll be having wine with dinner.” I had brought enough money with me for food and wine but not for anything else.
“Let me tell you that to begin we have fresh escargots this evening. The chef recommends them. This is very unusual for this time of year. Le hiver.” With that, like an Apache dancer, snapping his starched apron, he spun on his heel and departed, leaving us to peruse the menus. Piaf wafted over me. This was a taste of life as I had only imagined it.
Lydia roused me from my revere, suggesting, “Why don’t you order for the both of us, though I love escargots and prefer red wine.”
“I do as well,” I lied, I wasn’t in truth sure just what escargots were, “How about two of them and maybe some trout?” Truite I knew.
“But I really prefer red wine,” I wasn’t sure what she was signaling, “Maybe some chicken or veal? That would work.”
I was squinting at the menu. It was so dark in spite of the sputtering candle but I needed to see if they had any chicken and how much it cost. Thankfully they did and it was affordable. “Sure—two escargots and two cog au vins.”
Before I could call for him our garcon was back at the table, “We’ll have two of the cogs and two of the specials. Deux.”
“You mean, bien sur, les cogs au vins as entres, non?”
“Of course.”
“And pour boire?”
“Do you have red wine?”
I sensed the beginning of exasperation; and with a nod and perhaps a wink toward Lydia, he said, “Sans doute. Beaucoup. Many.” And with that he unceremoniously reached across the table and me, picking up the Carte du Vins and plopped it open to the Vin Rouge plastic covered page. As he was doing that, Lydia asked if I would get up so she could slide out of the booth. She wanted to “freshen up.”
The waiter hovered over me impatiently, tapping his fingers on the menus he clutched against his chest as I scanned down the list, looking for something that sounded sophisticated yet wasn’t too expensive. “How is the Beaujoulet Village?” I asked in a half voice, not looking up, to avoid eye contact and any hint of chastisement since I wasn’t at all sure of my “j” pronunciation.
Without responding, he turned on his heel and disappeared into the shadows.
Lydia returned, looking even more radiant. Whatever she had done to freshen up had worked. “Did you order the wine? On a night like this I could surely use some.” And as if on cue our waiter was back and in an intricate twisting of hands and wrists popped the cork which he passed along to me. Nervously I began to roll it back and forth on the table cloth. He stood there immobile and waited, looking from me to Lydia and then back to me. Now clearly exasperated, he wrapped the bottle in a napkin and poured about a half inch in my glass, cradling the bottle in his arm as if wanting me to see and read the label. It was too dark for that.
I was also beginning to feel exasperated myself, thinking how improper of him to serve me first and then to pour so little and to stand there all puffed up in Gallic pride as if he was a potentate. . . . I was getting ready to say something, but thought I would begin by just glaring at him. Which I did. We locked eyes. It was a test of good manners and male egos.
He took a step back and I began to again feel in command of the situation. After all we had just been with Merce and Bob and Cage while he had been prancing around in his apron in a basement of a French restaurant.
I turned toward Lydia, who I assumed would be feeling almost as much pride as I. She leaned toward me, under lit by the light of the throbbing candle and thus made more alluring, she whispered, “He’s waiting for you to taste it.”
I was confused, “To what?”
“You know, to taste it to see if it’s turned.”
“Turned into what?” I sensed doom lurking.
“To see if it tastes all right.” Was I sensing even more exasperation? “If you want to send it back.”
As I was about to say, “But I would never do that,” the garcon poured a splash into Lydia’s glass, sneering in my direction, “Peut-etre, voulez-vous, Madmoiselle le saveur?”
And in perfect French, with all “r’s” rolling and every “j” aspirating, Lydia raised the wine toward her blackened lips and said, “Avec plaisier.” She seemed at first to inhale it, dipping her nose well into the bulging goblet, and then, after swishing the wine from cheek to cheek, she said, “C’est bien. Merci. A bit innocent but still fine.” She nodded to him and he filled her glass and, with a further look of rebuke, mine.
Silence descended between us and I barely noticed when the escargots arrived, set in their specially indented dishes with what seemed like surgical instruments on the side. Needless to say I had no idea what to do with either the creatures in the shells or the tools of their extraction. Without a word, Lydia simply reached across and showed me what to do.
It would take much more than that to show me what to do. I clearly did not know what to do about many things. Though I vowed that come Monday, if I lived through the rest of dinner and the subway back to Columbia, I would stop being a Chemistry major and would switch to English. I could still be a pre-med, but I needed to learn many, many things from Lionel Trilling. That much I knew.
* * *
I was formally and officially enrolled next semester in Trilling’s course in Modern Lit, along with 150 other Jews and occasional Gentiles, the Jews seeking to rise from the cultural shtetls in which they were hatched. None more eager than I, still raw from the humiliations in Le Cave.
I sat now in an actual chair, no longer huddling on the lab steps. And in place of that rubber apron I broke out my Stag Shop tweeds, leaving the beret and pipe behind in the dorm, thinking they would draw too much attention to me—I needed to be inconspicuous as I made my way by stealth into this new and hermetic world.
I knew immediately that I was where I needed to be because during the very first class, Trilling prowled the lecture platform, tossing his leonine head, stopping by the window with his great brow aslant so as to catch the flat rays of late afternoon light that illuminated him like an icon, his very first words were something like—
“A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.”
Do you see what I mean? The “tyranny of my culture”! Whatever my parents were paying in tuition, I was at last getting their money’s worth.
Further, now on the other side of the room, my side, turning to us, to me, lowering his head and white mane—
“All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is self.”
Do you hear that Lydia? Merce? Cage? All of us anguished souls--Vin rouge for everyone. My treat!
Through that enchanted semester, paying close attention to the texts, Trilling raised questions about how we live our lives (thank you D.H.), about the character of good and evil (much appreciated, Friedrich), about the roles played by culture and biology (Sigmund, thank you), and the ambivalences when making moral choices (T.S. my new best friend). We came to look for something in Trilling that went beyond the insights of ordinary literary criticism. We expected something closer to wisdom.
He was so exalted, so radiant, existing so much in his own world of thought that as mere mortal undergraduates we took that wisdom scrap by scrap. Never was any of it directed toward any one of us or the result of anything we might have croaked back to him when he posed a question to the room. That wisdom was palpably present in the room, like the air itself, a rich oxygen of thought.
But there was at least the opportunity to write something for him, actually to him—the term paper about which he gave no guidance whatsoever, particularly how many pages it needed to be. Just, write a paper about any of the authors we have been reading. We knew by this that he was taking us seriously.
I decided to take a chance—to write about Kafka, about whom he confessed, after reading The Trial again (he actually reread the texts under consideration??), when he confessed that he did not have anything fresh to say about it, though his lectures certainly sounded fresh and imaginative to his disciples.
My paper was on “Farcical Elements in The Trial.” Whatever was possessing me? I dropped all other reading, attending all my other classes, and my favorite pastime, sleep, so I could hone and rehone the paper. After a week of frantic effort, I stumbled to his office, having redrafted and retyped it for the fourth time. Only his deadline stopped me from working on it until I reached middle age.
I dropped it secure in its plastic binder into a cardboard carton on a chair outside his office door. And waited. It was my first fully fleshed out paper as a pre-med-English-major, and I knew that what he might have to say about it would affect the course of the rest of my life. He had told us that they would be read by the end of the week and we could come by at that time to pick them up from that same carton. Rumor had it that he would not actually read them, that they would be read by one of his graduate assistants. But even what they had to say about them would be life-altering—they were his GAs, weren’t they?
With my classmates I lined for hours waiting in the corridor of Hamilton Hall for the papers to be dumped in the box. It was obvious that very little showering had occurred among us that week—it was a hot day and things were feeling very ripe so it was with various forms of relief that word spread down the hall that they were there and we could rummage through the pile to retrieve our offerings.
Though I had been among the first to line up, I allowed everyone to pass me and was thus the last to look for in my paper. There it was, seemingly untouched and unread alone in the bottom of the box. I gathered it to me, and as I walked back toward my dorm, barely breathing, I thumbed through it. I was distraught to notice that the twenty-seven pages were seemingly untouched—there was not one correction or anything underlined in red, much less any comment, however brief, scrawled in any of the margins. My first thought was that it was such a pathetic effort that the grad assistant hadn’t even read all the way through.
I was devastated. All I could think about was how I would need to get back into my Organic chemistry studies so I could rescue at least a C grade or there would also be no medical school for me. I saw my future looming with me in a windowless cubicle at a desk in an insurance company.
I slinked back to my room and collapsed on my bed, wondering if it was too late to get to the lab and work on my titrations.
As I lay there staring at the ceiling, maybe even contemplating if the light fixture would support my weight on a rope, one of my floor mates, Gene Adam pounded on the door. He was a real English major, on a fast track to graduate school, who had taken three courses with Trilling, and was eager to find out how I had done. The answer was immediately apparent when he found me sprawled out in despair on my cot.
“What happened? Did you flunk?”
“No,” I mumbled, “Worse than that. He didn’t even look at it. It came back blank--not a comment, not a grade. He just tossed it back in the box.”
Gene found the paper on my desk and flipped through it. I could see him shrugging his shoulders and muttering in confusion as he turned each of the unmarked pages. But just as he was about to toss it back, he slapped his hand on the desktop and screamed at me, “I can’t believe you. You’re a total moron. Look at this.” He held the paper up to me with the folder open to the blank page at the back that I had inserted to dress up the look of the paper. “Look at what he wrote. I mean Trilling himself. I recognize his handwriting.”
I pulled myself up off the bed and snatched the paper from him. There in Trilling’s own delicate hand, in pencil, faint but still vivid, in truth throbbing, was— “Well written.” And circled, my grade, an A minus.
* * *
And so when two weeks later, there was a flyer tacked to all the bulletin boards on campus, announcing that Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky and, and Allen Ginsberg would be on campus for a reading in McMillin Theater, and that Lionel Trilling would introduce them, I grabbed my blanket, pillow, and two boxes of cereal and raced over--it was scheduled for two days hence and I would need to sleep and eat outside the theater entrance so I could be at the front of the line and thus be able to get a seat in the first row. But since so many others with folding chairs and sleeping bags had the same idea, when I arrived, the line was already around the corner by much better equipped campers. I knew I would have to settle for the balcony again, as at the City Center, which was OK because these were my people and my world.
And so I squatted in line. But before my cereal ran out, and the rains came, the staff at McMillin took pity on those sprawled outside their door and let us buy tickets. Or maybe they were just tired of having to step over our ragtag army of Trilling and Ginsberg acolytes. This, though, took away some of the delicious opportunity to suffer for one’s art. It felt good, however, to have spent at least one night on the pavement in its service, and I needed to shave.
So, trice-armed with my ticket, my A minus, and my “Well written,” I took a break for the rest of the week from my sulfanilamide experiment and renewed my acquaintance with the West End, thinking there was no better place to prepare for what was upcoming.
I had not been there for some time, not wanting to revisit the memories of my time with Lydia; and thankfully did not find her there. Just the welcoming greeting of Johnny the bartender, who without missing a beat, as if I had been there just yesterday, asked, “The usual?” already pulling on the Watney’s Ale siphon--my “usual.”
And on the napkin on which Johnny rested my beer, I found myself beginning to write a poem.
Though I had immersed myself in my literature classes, during the past six months I had suspended all thoughts and even dreams of writing. I not only had made the pre-med-backup-plan compromise, but as I thought about what to do with my literary interests, under the same kind of pressure to be responsible, I had not as yet even begun to shrug off that tyrannical aspect of my culture that kept me tethered to practicalness: I could still hear the echo of my father’s bellowing when I told him about switching majors from Chemistry to English—“For what reason? You tell me you want to be happy. What does happiness have to do with anything?” And since I didn’t have a ready answer for him much less myself, I continued to straddle my many worlds.
So from where was this poem spawning?
these wooden streets
wet nimbused now
like starfish
crushed . . . .
And so on. Just this small napkin’s worth of words.
* * *
For the reading I remembered to bring along my pipe and beret, which I hoped would distinguish me, make me noticeable up in the shadows of the balcony, now that I was wanting to emerge from inconspicuousness.
The house was packed. The entire literature faculty was there, as were the graduate assistants and every English major, graduate and undergraduate, including from Barnard—though I, with relief, again did not see Lydia.
There were four chairs on the stage and a podium. Nothing more. Then suddenly, as if in a vision, they all appeared at once, in a surge—following the ever elegant Trilling from the wings were Corso, in tattered fatigues; Orlovsky, all blonde and tweeds; and Ginsberg, shuffling, slumping, awkward, covered in denim. I remember the clothes better than the poems, taking more note of how to look the part than the part itself—Would I be Trilling? Certainly not Orlovsky, reportedly Ginsberg’s lover. I could be Corso, clearly the minor player, perhaps more suited as a model for my A minus talent. Ginsberg of Howl and Kaddish was beyond imagining, though I already had the denims.
First up was Orlovsky, happily brief because his writing did not compare with the beauty of his lips or face or hair—“My body turned into sugar, poured into tea. I found the meaning.” And then there was Corso, twisted in a corkscrew at the podium, who read in a sputtering staccato more appropriate for Greenwich Village coffee houses than that baroque room—“I stand in the dark light of the dark street. And look up at my window, I was born there.” Beat though he fully was, he did have the courtesy to move along quickly, knowing he was in truth the opening act.
Then it was Ginsberg’s turn. This was his first appearance at the back university which years earlier had expelled him. Trilling rose to introduce him, smoothing his jacket which had remained buttoned while he sat. In his impeccable half-British diction he said something about how after going through Howl twice, “I find I don't know how to respond. The poem does not reach me. Its clue doesn't appear."
At this, Ginsberg, twisting in his seat, tossed one leg up over the left arm so he would be turned aggressively toward his old professor. Peering at him, with a wry smile on his already lined face. When he heard Trilling say his name in public for the first time in literary history, amplified in that great room, Ginsberg uncoiled his serpentine self and moved toward to the podium that had been transformed form the shuffle of his arrival to pure panther. Trilling returned to his seat, sat quickly, crossing his legs with considerable care so as not to disturb the tight crease in his trousers.
Ginsberg began by reading from "The Lion for Real." He told us that he dedicated the poem to his former teacher Lionel Trilling and that it described a series of spiritual visions he had had while at Columbia (now I got the lion reference), visions that had set him upon the mystical quest that had become his preoccupation, and etched those premature lines in his cheeks. The poem, he said, turning pointedly to face Trilling, also recounted the difficulty he had had in translating his visions to his friends, family, and teachers. I think at that reference, he took a half-step in Trilling’s direction, indicating that the poem reflected his own despair and sense of spiritual isolation at Columbia.
I do now remember one or two lines, which he then read, without referring to the tortured pile of his papers on the podium, speaking them in one long breath, off mike, leaning directly toward his adversary. We all needed to lean forward to hear them, knowing the Professor Kandisky of the poem was Professor Trilling!
sat by his side every night averting my eyes from his hungry motheaten face
stopped eating myself he got weaker and roared at night while I had nightmares
Eaten by lion in bookstore on Cosmic Campus, a lion myself starved by
Professor Kandisky, dying in a lion's flophouse circus
Kandisky/Trilling in a flophouse? Though there were 1,400 of us packed into that theater, I sensed that everyone had stopped breathing. Even the great scions of literature gasped, including the ancient Moses Hadas, Columbia’s lion of Greek Tragedy, which for him could have been fatal; and Mark Van Doren, of the Van Doren literary dynasty that included his disgraced quiz-show son Charles.
Ginsberg turned his back to his professor on the stage, and very much into the microphone this time, looking up especially to those of us breathless in the balcony, “Remember,” he said, imitating Trilling’s clipped style, “All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men. It springs from the anguish of great souls.”
And without turning back to him, but still to us, Ginsberg asked, “Isn’t that so Mr. Trilling?” If the Great Hadas had been thinking in a Sophoclean mode, he must have sensed patricide.
* * *
For the first time in my life I needed a drink and there was of course only one place to seek it.
Though it was well past 11:00 p.m., Johnny was still on duty and moved to the Watney’s tap as he saw me at the door. I had raced away from the commotion that ensued at McMillin and when I got to the West End it was empty—every one of the regulars had been at the event.
I was pulsating.
I had had my own vision. Though it would not lead to a lifetime-long spiritual quest or probably even many publishable poems, I at least right then knew I would never again set foot in a chemistry lab and there would be no medical school. I didn’t know where I was headed, but it was surely not there. Even if to oblivion.
I collapsed onto my stool and in one swallow sucked in half the draft. I played and replayed the tape in my head of what had transpired—especially Ginsburg’s call to us in the balcony about the “anguish of souls”—actually quoting back to him and to us Trilling’s own words, but as transmuted up to us, through the medium of Ginsberg, they felt as if they had reshaped the very neurons in my cerebellum.
Thus stimulated, on a second cocktail napkin, in almost automatic writing, as if the words were coming to me from a source outside myself, I wrote, to conclude the poem I had begun a few days ago--
on these I trod
wet now as the wood
after passing the baby clams
but never having asked
if you cried
when your father died
And with that the front door swung open and in a rush of Beats in Army-Navy clothes, at the head of the pack, was Ginsberg, with Orlovsky at his side. “Johnny,” he cried, with arms outstretched as he made his way to the bar.
And Johnny said, “The usual?” reaching for a bottle of Ballantine.
But Ginsberg paused, as if disoriented, at the horseshoe end of the bar near where I was frozen to my stool. Looking around for Johnny who had disappeared below the bar to get Ginsberg’s beer from the cooler down there where he kept the bottles. As Johnny’s head reemerged, while still half bent over, he waved to me with the back of his hand. To get up. To move.
I was on Ginsberg’s stool! Which now felt like a griddle. I leapt off it as if afraid it would roast and flay my body.
“That’s all right,” he said to me, touching my shoulder with the sting of his hand, “Stay where you are. I can sit anywhere. After all that, I need a beer, maybe two, and then we’re off.” With a wink toward Orlovsky, he to me added, “You look as if you belong here.” He nodded to Johnny, indicating everything was fine, but Johnny’s look back to me made it clear that I had still better move, and fast. Not that I needed any reminding.
Seeking inconspicuousness again, I ducked into a dark booth on the other side of the bar, not pausing to take my Watney’s with me. Ginsberg lowered himself onto his stool and was immediately engulfed by the crowd that continued to surge in from McMillin.
Though I was physically present, the surreality of that entire evening, now with Ginsberg unbelievably looming fewer than ten feet away, turned the West End into a mix of dreams and cinematic images, with me more a distant, wishful observer than a physical presence.
Almost immediately, I felt myself slipping out of consciousness. It was more than the Watney’s taking hold of me. And as I was about to literally slide off the leather banquette, just as I was about to collapse under the influence, and the bench, I saw as if he was a hallucination, the hair-haloed head of Ginsberg, towering before me.
“Is this yours?” he asked, holding something out toward me.
“My what?” I somehow managed to mumble, desperately trying to hold on to the table.
“This, this napkin,” his hand was still extended. “I found it where you were sitting. At the bar,” he smiled, “At your seat.”
“Yes, my napkin. Thank you. I left it there. Sorry. I meant to take it with me. And my beer.”
“You should have it because I saw your were writing on it.”
“I was just doodling. I’m not really a writer or anything.” I was by then hoping I would pass out entirely and disappear forever in that booth.
“Actually, I thought it wasn’t bad. I liked the reference to the ‘baby clams.’”
He turned to his coterie who were watching and listening from the bar, and said to them more than to me, “Its clue appeared to me.”
Then he was gone, back out into the blare of Broadway, in pursuit of his vision, he and they rolling and embracing in fits of ribald laughter.
* * *
I did in fact return to the Lab and did in fact managed to eek out a C plus in Organic, enough to guarantee at least a fighting chance of being accepted by a second-tier medical school somewhere in the middle of the country.
I had taken that beer-soaked napkin back to my room and aligned it to the first one, feeling that the two parts formed something resembling an actual poem, the clue of which remaining sufficiently allusive to me to pump me full of enough courage to submit it for publication to a few small presses. And, to my surprise and delight, before even submitting any applications to Med schools, I heard from the mimeographed poetry magazine, Black Sun, that my crushed starfish poem would be published--if they could get enough money together to by ink for the printing machine.
Nothing much came of that. And to this day I wonder what would have happened if Trilling had given me a straight A on my Kafka paper.
Would that have been the difference?
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:04 PM
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