Professors at Columbia University

Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling

Known as the great intellectual minds on the Morningside campus, Van Doren and Trilling were professors at Columbia University and were very important figures in the creation of Columbia University as a "great, good place." They were influential to beat poets, such as Allen Ginsberg, and both were even noted as helping, "Ginsberg out of scrapes with college administration." Dan Wakefield, in his novel, New York in the Fifties, discusses how these, "men were surrogate fathers for many of us" that were students at Columbia University during their tenure.

Mark Van Doren (1894-1972)

Described as a "living legend" in Newsweek, Mark Van Doren was an American critic, poet and editor. He joined the Columbia University faculty in 1920, attained full professorship in 1942, and taught English there until 1959. Some of his infamous students include both Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He is the father of Charles Van Doren who was depicted in the film Quiz Show.

Wakefield claims that, "his eyes gave off a love of his work and the world, and he had a playful and wry sense of humor." He was a respected man, for both his teachings and his writings. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems in 1940 and wrote many short stories, novels, plays and children's books. Below is a poem he wrote in 1943:

How far is it to peace, the piper sighed, The solitary, sweating as he paused. Asphalt the noon; the ravens, terrified, Fled carrion thunder that percussion caused.

The envelope of earth was powder loud; The taut wings shivered, driven at the sun The piper put his pipe away and bowed. Not here, he said, I hunt the love-cool one.

The dancer with the clipped hair Where is she? We shook our heads, parting for him to pass Our lady was of no such trim degree And none of us had seen her face, alas.

She was the very ridges that we must scale, Securing the rough top. And how she smiled Was how our strength would issue. Not to fail was having her gigantic, undefiled.

For homely goddess, big as the world that burned, Grandmother and taskmistress, field and town We let the stranger go; but when we turned Our lady lived, fierce in each other's frown.

Mark Van Doren

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975)

"A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment."

American critic and a professor at Columbia, he wrote essays (e.g., The Liberal Imagination, 1950, The Opposing Self, 1955) that combine social, psychological, and political insights with literary criticism and scholarship. His other works include a novel and biographies. Both Kerouac and Ginsberg used to visit his home and look to him for advice and encouragement. His wife, Diana Trilling, is a literary and cultural critic and wrote about a beat poetry meeting in which Ginsberg performed and dedicated a poem to her husband.

Elisa Stafford

This quote seems like a toned-down premonition of the decade that is soon to follow Trilling's 1958 essay.

"It is no accident, comrades, it is decidedly 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 while the liberal
intellectual is convinved that he has no power to control the political
future, the future of the free world, and that therefore he must submit to
what he defines as political necessity."

--Diana Trilling, 1958

Meredith Walker

To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been: Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in. (Van Doren)

Wit is the only wall between us and the dark. (Van Doren)

Teaching is the art of assisting discovery. (Van Doren)

There are two statements about human beings that are true: that all human beings are alike, and that all are different. On those two facts all human wisdom is founded. (Van Doren)

Bring in ideas and entertain them royally, for one of them may be king. (Van Doren)

There is a certain minimum of our intellectual and spiritual tradition which one must experience and understand to be called educated.(Trilling)

Meredith Walker

I really liked the Dickstein piece, only because I am a fan of Ginsberg and what he stands for. I thought the Trilling piece was too stuffy and upper-classish (is that a word?) Anyway, Dickstein's piece was written in a way that I felt like I was there when I was reading it. You know, I actually read both articles, and I have to admit that I liked the end of Trilling's. I like it when you can tell that a person has been through a transition. At the beginning of the piece, Trilling takes a condescending point of view toward the Beats. But at the end, she realizes that Ginsberg has been through a lot in his life and she comes to respect him. She respects him and acknowledges that he is a good poet. She even mentions early in the article that respect is what Ginsberg is seeking. Respect from authority figures, from society. She gives him this very thing at the end. As for Dickstein, he is not a big fan of the Beats, but after hearing them, he realizes there is something inside him which draws him to go hear Ginsberg's poetry. Is that the Great Good Place for him? The stirring inside him which forces him to go hear poetry? Sure, why not? I got the idea that Columbia is a great good place for Ginsberg, since he keeps returning there to give poetry readings. There is something about the university which draws Ginsberg back-- his past history at the school, making amends, achieving closure. Trilling's piece touches on student-faculty relationships-- how her husband and Mark Van Doren represtented father figures to Ginsberg. It seems like Ginsberg's father was never really there for him, and again, Ginsberg is seen as searching for respect, for appreciation, for acceptance, and he finds this through his teachers. Maybe we could connect Ginsberg's search with our own searches. It kind of shows that it takes a long time to find what you are looking for in life, but you eventually find it. Trilling seemed to be searching for a reason for Ginsber'g reverence toward her husband, and she found her reason after hearing Ginsberg's love poem to Lionel Trilling.

Francine Jaffe

Sally Banes proposes that Greenwich Village consisted of a community of diverse artists who came together in a "Global Village." She believes that the avant-garde had "alternative communities that changed power relations, creating intimacy outside the family and valuing equality among members."

Diana Trilling and Virgil Thomson present a contradictory view on family and community. Discussing New York intellectual life they agreed that there was remarkably little contact between Trilling's literary/political intellectual group and Thompson's more broadly artistic circle. Trilling commented that the visual and aural sensibilities of the Partisan Review intellectuals were not developed.

Thomas Bender agrees that in this period two worlds existed: art and intellect, one focused on the world and the other was concerned with images and sounds. Thomson writes that only by recovering the other side of the world, what she calls the "eye people and ear people" can one understand the important role in making New York what it has become in our time.

Amy Eichenwald

NY Universities

"New York is really the metropolitan city of our country. The center of commercial activity, the vast reservoir of wealth, it takes the lead in the elegancies and splendor of life, in the arts of luxury and amusement. It is also the great emporium of book and the fine arts. Here resort the professors of music and of the arts of design. Here literary men are taking up their abode. Here literary institutions of various kinds and grades have already come into being. Commerce, wealth, and elegance invite, nay, demand the invigorating life, the counterbalancing power and activity of intellectual cultivation. Whatever is requisite for a great Institution of Learning can here be more rapidly collected. By adding to the natural attractions of a metropolitan city the attractions of literature, science, and art, as embodied in a great University, students from every part of the Union would be naturally drawn together. We should thus have a fully appointed national Institution where the bonds of our nationality would be strengthened by the loftiest form of education, the sympathy of scholars, and the noblest productions of education, the sympathy of scholars, and the noblest productions of literature."

-John Dewey, "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy," in John Dewey et al., Creative Intelligence (1917)

Amy Eichenwald