Reminiscences of My Time with Allen Ginsberg

I read with great interest the series of articles on Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers that appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of DIVISION/Review. Like William Fried, I had trudged up the many flights of narrow tenement stairs to spend time with Allen Ginsberg. Our first visit was unforgettable. A handsome, shirtless young man, Peter Orlof-sky, opened the door, sizing me coldly; perhaps seeing a sexual competitor, or merely a conventional kid—I was twenty-three. Allen sat half prone on a narrow cot which served as a couch, as an interviewer from the Italian version of Life magazine concluded. I don't think I ever visited his railroad flat without the presence of an assortment of people. William Fried might have been one of them.

Allen greeted me as if we knew each other. We had spoken for an hour on the phone, from my office at Random House, where I was a reader for the senior trade editors and one of the two people responsible for getting through the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. He had asked a bit about me and my background. When I told him that I had been an attendant at Creedmoor Hospital while a co-op student at Antioch College, he misheard me as having been a patient, and I had to correct him. That did not seem to matter, and he went on about his mental hospitalization, as if it had been an adolescent adventure, a trip, a mystical portal. He told me some about his mother's mental illness and hospitalizations too, though without the anguished beauty of his poetry (Kaddish). I had difficulty ending the conversation.

Allen kept many affectionate friends and acquaintances from his student days at Columbia; Jason Epstein was one of them. Although I did not know it at that time, Jason had an awesome reputation as the young founder of quality paperbacks. In his spare time, he was organizing the team to publish what would become the New York Review of Books. I just knew that he was one of the liveliest of the bunch of senior editors at Random House, and when