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at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient

heavenly connection to the starry dynamo

in the machinery of night.

And so on.

I like “Howl” a lot. Who wouldn’t? It just doesn’t have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg’s closest friends, if I’m not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University.

No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first—and after that biochemistry.

Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.

• • •

Also, and again I intend no offense, the most meaningful and often harrowing adventures which I and many like me have experienced have had to do with the rearing of children. “Howl” does not deal with such adventures.

Truly great poems never do, somehow.

• • •

Allen Ginsberg and I were inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in the same year, 1973. Somebody from Newsweek called me up to ask what I had to say about two such antiestablishment writers being embraced by such a conservative organization.

I said this, and I meant it, and my comment was not printed: “My goodness, if Mr. Ginsberg and I aren’t already members of the establishment, I don’t know who is.”

• • •

To return to the subject of childhood playmates: In the Vonnegut house, with its charge-account deadbeats, and in the Goldstein house next door, with its bankruptcy, there were many books. As luck would have it, the Goldstein children and I, and the Marks children three doors down, whose father would soon die quite suddenly, could all read about as easily as we could eat chocolate ice cream. Thus, at a very tender age and in utter silence, disturbing no one, being children as good as gold, we were comforted and nourished by human minds which were calmer and more patient and amusing and unafraid than our parents could afford to be.

• • •

Years later, on October 1, 1976, I would pay this circuitous tribute to the art of reading at the dedication of a new library at Connecticut College, New London:

“The name of this speech is ’The Noodle Factory.’

“Like life itself, this speech will be over before you know it. Life is so short!

“I was born only yesterday morning, moments after daybreak—and yet, this afternoon, I am fifty-four years old. I am a mere baby, and yet here I am dedicating a library. Something has gone wrong.

“I have a painter friend named Syd Solomon. He was also born only yesterday. And the next thing he knew, it was time for him to have a retrospective exhibition of his paintings going back thirty-five years. Syd asked a woman claiming to be his wife what on earth had happened. She said, ’Syd, you’re fifty-eight years old now.’

“You can imagine how he felt.

“Another thing Syd found out was that he was a veteran of something called the Second World War. Somebody said I was in that war, too. Maybe so. I don’t argue when people tell me things like that.

“I decided to read up on that war some. I went to a library a lot like this one. It was a building full of books. I learned that the Second World War was so terrible that it caused Adolf Hitler himself to commit suicide. Think of that: He had just been born, and suddenly it was time for him to shoot himself.

“That’s history for you. You can read about it yourself.

“My friend Syd Solomon was certainly luckier than Hider. All Syd had to do was put on a retrospective exhibition. So I tried to help him out—by writing an essay for the front of his catalogue.

“That is certainly one of the nice things about this planet, I think—the way people will try to help other people sometimes.

“In the words of Barbra Streisand, which