Allen Ginsberg [Boulder, CO] to Diana Trilling [New York, NY] January 15, 1979

Dear Diana:

Peter showed me your note to him of a month ago, I’d hoped to answer before I left NY but was due here to teach Blake (mostly Vala The Four Zoas) and am only now catching up on mail.

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’d been banned from setting foot on the campus as an “unwholesome influence” on his friends among students (Dean McKnight’s phrase) came to see me after a long talk with Burroughs who’d warned him solemnly that if he continued to cling to his mother’s apron strings he’d find his destiny to be closed in narrower and narrower circles around her figure – an uncannily factual prophecy that astounded Jack! So he appeared in my dorm room on Friday midnight, just as I was finishing my most immense piece of juvenilia, The Last Voyage a poem modeled on both Bateau Ivre of Rimbaud and Le Voyage of Baudelaire done in iambic quatrains imitative of my father’s poetries, saying young farewell to “Society.”

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 (thus losing his football scholarship) – was it Mr. Furman? [sic: Furey] 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 – (my roommate William Wort Lancaster Jr. son of Chairman of National City Bank, head of Amer-Soviet Friendship Society, whose mother as member of Karen Horney Society’d paid for years of adolescent analysis for him as he had an awful tic round eye and mouth, had risen early and gone to class) – as I writ, Kerouac jumped into bed and pulled the covers over his head and went to sleep 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 grabbed a towel and dirtied it clearing the window of what charwoman and assistant dean considered speakably objectionable. “The Dean will want to see you later,” and he departed. When I went downstairs an hour later, I found a $2.75 dorm bill for an overnight guest and a note informing me I was wanted at 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.”

Actually I hadn’t done much of anything, and on Burroughs’ advice I’d been reading C.F. Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night wherein the second chapter the hero finds himself in the middle of a World War I battlefield and recognizing that everyone about him is completely mad, crazily shooting and being shot at near a ravaged woods, decides to flee the scene immediately.

“Oh yes I do, Sir, I do, whatever can I do to explain or make amends.” This seemed to be the best tactic. “Mr. Ginsberg, I hope you realize the enormity of what you’ve done.”

Diana, by the time the story got to you and Lionel I have no idea what it sounded like but I assume the only devil that remained imprinted in faculty memory was “Fuck the Jews” as if in some awful psychological self-mutilation this poor sensitive mad-mother’d student was internalizing the torments of rejection he might have supposed were being laid on him by an authoritative society or class beyond his innocent comprehension etc. I’m not sure what psychological system was devised to “understand” this case. However, no evidence of the situation remained after dust and whispered gossip (I hope) had vanish’d to oblivion, other than the single “shocking” or “old” slogan “Fuck the Jews” which seemed to be the only thing remembered of the entire comedy when, a decade and half later, you recollected “The Other Night at Columbia.”

So, around that time, after your essay, I wrote you, or Lionel, or both, a long letter on mailgram stationary, from San Francisco I think, explaining in detail, as I have again just now, the entire contents of the vanished windowpane, and the context, pleading for some common sense and humor, as well as accuracy, also hoping to disburden you and he of whatever weight of anxiety you might have felt about my poor relation to my “Self” or heritage.

I was somewhat disappointed to get a 1959 reply from Lionel that you had both read my letter, and understood it, but that I was making a mountain out of a molehill, that it was not so serious a matter that it made any difference what I particularly wrote on the window. I was disappointed because I thought that much had been made by you of the phrase “Fuck the Jews” out of context of “Butler has no balls” etc.; yet it made me seem foolish to take it seriously enough to correct and write you about it. Did you feel it was important but he didn’t feel so? Did I feel it was important but you didn’t? I never could figure it out. But in any case I’d written the matter up in detail, sent you the account, and done my best to be reasonable. Still, decade after decade, Columbia wits who read your essay do ask me, is it true you wrote “Fuck the Jews” and did get kicked out of Columbia? “Oh yes” I reply, “but you see it was like this etc. . . .” And as a matter of fact I’ve laid out in scholarly print one place and another public and private the Full Compleat and Unexpurgated Tale of the Rape of the Windowpane . . . but especially to you and Lionel back around 1959 as above described, and so if you have access to old letters from me you may locate it, and Lionel’s reply is sitting available at 801 Butler in Special Collections, where he so kindly helped me place my papers for archive.

So it was a little jolting to see your note to Peter saying “because he had written in the dust on a window in one of the halls ‘Nicholas Murray Butler has no balls!’ But this is not at all what Allen wrote. Surely he must remember that he wrote: ‘Fuck the Jews.’”

Now I have gone through all these three pages to give you precise detailed accounting, as I went through two pages same a decade or more ago, yea two decades, about an event 3 ½ decades mellowed in the cask. I hope it relieves you of the fear that all these decades I have been nursing some terrible neurosis of Jewish Self, a shameful secret more awful to recollect than the openly joyful recollection of most “terrible” family tragedies in the poem Kaddish. See? Don’t worry, I’ve been alright all along.

Meanwhile, as the precise Text on the Vanish’d Windowpane has been established for scholars (actually I was dismayed your scholarly husband didn’t seem to recognize that I was doing that, formally, in 1959 letter, as this as well) I’ve taken the liberty recently, when the matter rose among scholars, to emphasize the phrase “Butler Has no Balls” as co-equal to and, in fact, on one rare occasion, pre-eminent above “Fuck the Jews.”

I reasoned that since half of my impertinent remarks in the dust were so exclusively emphasized in the past, I might take at least one time, in graybeard maturity, the liberty of making emphatic notice of the other half of this entirely trivial text which has, much through your efforts, appear’d to’ve gained temporary immortality. Doubtless, patient scholars future will see thru this recent college humor.

It is not your information or opinions I am contesting, correcting or challenging here: what I’m aiming at is decades old, an attitudinal vanity masked as moral responsibility, and inability to get basic facts straight disguised as superior sinceritas.

“Don’t strike at the heart” say Buddhist slogans. True. Goodnight. I’ve written you a long long letter, I don’t believe in eternal damnation, you probably do, poor girl . . . it’s not important to be right.

As ever             
Allen Ginsberg