"To Allen" is a short piece written for the collection Best Minds: A Tribute to Allen Ginsberg, published in 1986 and edited by Bill Morgan and Bob Rosenthal.
Summary[]
Allen Ginsberg, 1979
Although the course of their lives have been very different, Vonnegut and Ginsberg share the same audience. They first met in 1970 at a banquet in honor of John Updike in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In addition to praising Updike, Vonnegut said he had heard from many people that Ginsberg's reputation was as "a loving, articulate, anti-death saint much needed in the twentieth century". Afterward, at "a fairly riotous party", the two held hands while watching the proceedings. When Vonnegut recounted this to friend and novelist José Donoso, the latter was jealous since the two of them had never held hands.
A year later, Vonnegut and Ginsberg were inducted into the American Institute of Arts and Letters. Asked by a reporter from Newsweek how it felt to be two outsiders ingested by the Establishment, Vonnegut replied that if the two of them weren't the Establishment, he didn't know who was. Through dumb luck rather than calculation, the two of them are "mindfuckers who are purely American" and not foreign, thus are less subject to "truly furious rejection programs in the body politic". As Ginsberg turns sixty, the two factions in the United States are between the left of "love and life" and the right of "hate and death". Vonnegut ends by saying he loves Ginsberg more than he can say.[1]
"Friendly Legend"[]
The edition of Rolling Stone published May 29, 1997 contained a feature entitled "Friendly Legend" marking the passing of Ginsberg, featuring comments and remembrances from Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs, John Cale, Norman Mailer, and others. In it, Vonnegut again recounts the story of their admission into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973, while adding that he was "fond of Allen" whose "love was uncritical and utterly open and irresistible", calling him "a saint and the only politically effective poet" of Vonnegut's lifetime.[2]